Always in pain.
All stimuli that keep a person informed about what is happening inside and outside the body pass through a structure in the midbrain known as the thalamus. Only the sense of smell is excluded, but everything you hear, see, feel, etc., is processed there.
The role of this thalamus cannot be overestimated. This has long been known to osteopaths, and therefore it does not surprise me that it is mentioned again in a recent article in the NRC of Saturday, June 17th last regarding chronic pain:
This time, fMRI scanning has demonstrated that the thalamus, emotion centers, and other areas in the cerebral cortex are involved in chronic pain. The thalamus is not merely a relay station for information, but can also filter it out. This prevents a person from being needlessly overloaded with, for example, auditory stimuli or information from the musculoskeletal system. Because the thalamus is influenced by, among others, the amygdala (part of the emotional center) and the hippocampus (memory), the thalamus can also ‘color’ the received information. This applies, for instance, to proprioceptive information (= including body awareness) from the musculoskeletal system. In other words, the most recent trauma may have already healed, but the impression made by this recent injury, coupled with an old, severe car accident involving mechanical stress in the same area—for example, in the right leg—can sustain the recent pain.
This has long been known to osteopaths, and they are uniquely equipped to address this. The concluding tip in this article from a patient with chronic pain, “Accepting that it will never go away,” can be very valuable, but not until every possibility has been explored, and in my opinion, the vision and approach of an osteopath certainly belong in that process.
