Pain Early In Life Creates Less Later

~~On first blush this sounds like a pretty good concept to avoid pain in adulthood. Pain is something that we normally want to avoid, but let's take a step back here and examine pain for a moment. As I discuss each month in my Family Health and Wellness Program, (FH&WP) (register here to attend the January 14 program) pain is not a bad thing. Yes, we are deluded into thinking that pain is bad every day in the media with commercials and ads touting the latest "pain killing analgesic pill, potion, cream, or powder". The plain truth of the matter is that Pain is actually a warning sign or signal of an underlying problem or as I say in my program "the cause" of your symptom, which in this case is pain. We unfortunately have been lulled into a false sense of security with the fallacy that when the pain is gone the problem or cause of that pain or symptom is also gone. That unfortunately ladies and gentlemen is simply and unequivocally is not the case. You see that pain or symptom and the cause or true problem are not one in the same. No, on the contrary one is there simply to let you know that the other is there.
 
So how does pain early in life affect us later in life, and what is the true significance of this relationship? Let's look at one study which was recently performed at the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University. The findings of this study indicate that pain early in life alters nerve circuits in the brain that regulate stress. This indicates that pain in infancy causes alterations later in life in the adult responses to anxiety, stress and pain.
 
This is a very interesting concept relative to how infants are treated routinely in a hospital setting. As an example when procedures such as circumcisions in the past (more recently anesthesia is used in this procedure), insertion of feeding tubes, and intravenous lines, intubation, and routine and repetitive heel lances for repeat blood tests. One thing that is often overlooked is a vaginal delivery, which research has demonstrated causes a great deal of infant pain. These processes cause a great deal of pain for an infant experiencing each one of these procedures.
 
What the research performed at Georgia State indicates is that infants who experience such painful procedures demonstrate alterations in the brain receptors for stress, anxiety, and pain. This leads to the recognition that these early infant experiences dampen the pain response in these individuals in adulthood. These alterations have been demonstrated in other studies to be associated with mood disorders as well.
 
While a reduction in adult pain sounds like a positive thing if you continue to believe the marketing of powders, potions, and pills that you are bombarded with every day. If however you recognize what is the reality of the pain/symptom vs. problem/cause relationship you can recognize that the pain while often extremely uncomfortable to say the least, is actually there to alert you that a problem exists. With this in mind realize that this research helps us to understand that individuals who experience such early life pain may actually be dampening their pain response in adulthood. Just think of what dilemmas this can lead to for these adults. That chest pain that they feel mildly could actually be a life threatening heart attack. The right shoulder blade pain that might feel like a mildly pulled muscle could represent a gangrenous gall bladder. You get the idea.
 
What I want you all to take away from all of this is that Pain is not the bad guy that we all have been conditioned to think of it as. I also want you to recognize is that unlike what was commonly perceived by many in the medical community in the past, infants in fact do feel pain. We need to be sensitive to that fact.
 
For those of you who are within commuting distance to my office feel free to join us of our next FH&WP. I can assure you that you will take more home with you than you have when you enter. I always tell my Team in my office that as I am doing the program I see the "light bulbs" going on over every head in the room as those individuals who are seated in the program begin to "get it". I hope that you will join us. Believe me if I didn't see that value in the program, and others didn't gain more by attending I wouldn't have discontinued doing the program along time ago. I have chosen however to do my FH&WP every month consecutively for the last 28 years non-stop.