Unveiling the Parallels: Food Poisoning and Chronic Pain- Part 1

Have you ever considered the similarity between food poisoning and chronic pain? No? Just us? Okay, well for those of you who have experienced food poisoning or chronic pain, we can start with the fact that they both SUCK. And beyond the obvious discomfort of each, they share a profound commonality: the dread of recurrence. 

With food poisoning, even the THOUGHT of the food that caused puking is unbearable. With chronic pain,  just looking at a barbell when your back aches is unbearable. Let's delve deeper into this parallel.

How is Food Poisoning Related to PT? 

Food poisoning can be analogous to the pain experienced in more ways than one. Just as the thought of eating said food that caused you to puke, chronic pain presents similarly in the sense that in an athlete with a painful knee, even the thought of going down the stairs makes them nervous. 

As researchers note, “There is no doubt that the anticipated threat of intense pain can “capture one's attention” and that this attention can be difficult to disengage from. This will often result in the constant vigilance and monitoring of pain sensations, as well as the associated false belief that such pain sensations may be actual signs of reinjury or the progression of a serious disease” (Gatchel et al. 2016). 

All it takes is one negative experience to catastrophize, avoid, and protect against any movement that causes pain. It's normal, and human nature, to avoid things that previously caused us discomfort. But actually avoiding these things can sometimes be more HARMFUL to us, as it can lower our overall threshold for pain and accompanying tissue tolerance even further. 

The Mechanism

First, we gotta understand WHY IT HAPPENS.

• Our nervous systems were designed to be just that - nervous - to protect us from potential threats (like bad food). 

• That means, when we have a negative or painful experience with something (food, injury, musculoskeletal pain, or emotional turmoil), we become highly conditioned to avoid it, and that can actually lead to us being even MORE sensitized to it.

There's so many analogies for this. A bad break up. Trust being lost in buckets, gained in droplets, etc. Because our bodies are trying to protect us, we're actually likely to have pain with that experience the next time. This is because we have become overly sensitized to a specific, previously non-threatening stimulus.

This is all because pain is our bodies' way of alerting us of POTENTIAL threats. It is the body’s attempt to “warn” us of a potential threat, even if there's nothing wrong or harmful about it.

Our bodies take all of the information and give us a signal, and one NEGATIVE experience has a lot more weight than a positive experience. Stated another way, trying to UNLEARN something is typically harder than trying to LEARN something. What's interesting - this response can be heightened depending on your personality and other traits.

For example, let’s look at guarding, a common behavior we see after injury or in those with chronic pain. Guarding is “behavior[s] aimed at preventing or alleviating pain, which includes stiffness, hesitation, and bracing”  (Olugbade 2019). With guarding, think: limping, not bending over, tensing up.  

And how does guarding tie back to pain response and personality? A recent study found that,  “…anxiety, and not pain, directly predicted guarding. Pain only predicted guarding indirectly, mediated by anxiety” (Olugbade 2019).

So if you tend to be a more anxious person, this might further exacerbate your pain experience. This is just one of the many nuances that helps us begin to understand why two people with very similar injuries may have vastly different pain experiences.

What Does This Mean For My Pain? 

You can see how this pain system is obviously really helpful from an evolutionary standpoint, but it can also be really frustrating, especially in this day and age when we aren't encountering tigers or rattle snakes on a daily basis.

Just because something has been painful before doesn't mean it's harmful to you and avoiding it can actually make it MORE painful, because you're confirming to your body that it IS something to be afraid of.

Join Us in Your Journey to Movement Freedom

At Made 2 Move, we're committed to guiding you towards a future unencumbered by pain. Our therapists are here to help you build positive movement experiences in the gym, at work, in your sport, and life as a whole. Reach out to frontdesk@made2movept.com to get set up with one of our PTs today!

And tune in for next week’s blog discussing how PT can help you start to effectively move the needle in the right direction with chronic pain.