Pain Relief Is Step One. But Why Did It Happen in the First Place?

I've been using the word “triage” a lot with clients lately.

When someone comes into my office hurting, sometimes the first priority is pretty simple: let's get you feeling better.

Your back hurts. Your shoulder won't move without pain. Your foot is bothering you every time you walk. You're uncomfortable, frustrated, and you want some relief.

There is absolutely a time and place for focusing directly on the area that hurts.

I think of this as the triage phase of bodywork.

But getting an area to feel better and figuring out why it became painful in the first place aren't always the same thing.

And that's where the work gets interesting.

First, the goal is to decrease or eliminate the pain

When something hurts, your body naturally starts adapting around it.

You might move differently, avoid certain positions, tighten up around the area, or shift more work somewhere else. Sometimes these changes are obvious, and sometimes they're so subtle that you don't even realize you're doing them.

So when you first come in, I may spend a significant amount of time working directly with the area that's bothering you.

With Dermal-Fascial Restoration (DFR), I can work with restrictions in the superficial fascial layers that may be affecting how freely the tissues move and glide. With Fascia Stretch Therapy (FST), we may use assisted movement and stretching to help restore comfortable movement through a larger area.

Sometimes people leave that first session feeling dramatically different.

That's great.

But it doesn't necessarily mean we're finished.

Feeling Better Gives Us an Opportunity to Ask a Different Question

Once the immediate pain has settled down, I become less interested in “How do we make this spot stop hurting?”

Now I want to know:

Why was this spot have a problem in the first place?

Maybe your low back has been doing more work because your hips aren't moving well.

Maybe your foot keeps getting overloaded because something farther up the chain is changing the way you walk.

Maybe an old injury caused you to move differently years ago, and your body got incredibly good at compensating around it.

Maybe a surgical scar is restricting movement in a way you never connected to your current symptoms.

Or maybe there isn't one single cause at all.

Bodies are complicated. Pain is complicated. I don't think it's realistic to assume that every painful area has one hidden problem that, once found, magically fixes everything.

But we can start looking for the factors that may be contributing to it.

The Place That Hurts is usually not the Whole Story

This is one of the biggest differences in how I approach bodywork.

Of course I care about where you hurt. Pain gives us important information.

But I don't want to stop there.

If your right shoulder keeps bothering you, I want to look at your shoulder, but I may also want to see how your rib cage, neck, chest, and even the rest of your body are moving.

If you have recurring foot pain, I'm going to work with the foot. But I'm also interested in what's happening at the ankle, lower leg, knee, hip, and how you're loading that foot when you move.

To help prevent a reoccurrence, I need to understand the bigger picture.

Old Injuries Still Matter

One of the things I find particularly interesting is how often an old injury or surgery comes up when we start looking at someone's movement history.

A scar may have healed beautifully from a medical perspective. An ankle sprain may have happened ten years ago. A knee injury might not hurt anymore.

But your body had to adapt while that area was healing. Injury, surgery, and the scar tissue that forms during healing can also change how tissues move and glide in that area, sometimes leaving restrictions long after the original injury no longer hurts.

Over time, those restrictions may influence how the body moves and distributes load, potentially contributing to problems somewhere else.

That doesn't mean an old injury is automatically responsible for whatever hurts today. But it does mean it's worth considering as part of the history, especially when a problem keeps returning despite repeatedly treating the painful area.

This is also one of the reasons I'm so interested in fascia. Fascia connects and surrounds structures throughout the body, and restrictions don't always follow the neat boundaries we tend to use when we think about individual muscles.

Looking at how those layers move gives me another piece of the puzzle.

Bodywork Isn't the Entire Answer Either

This part is important.

My goal isn't to make you dependent on bodywork.

I can help improve restrictions, restore movement, and create an opportunity for your body to move differently.

But then you have to use that movement.

Strength training, walking, climbing, biking, mobility work, or whatever movement makes sense for you helps your body build capacity in the ranges we've opened up.

I think of bodywork as helping remove some of the roadblocks.

Then movement helps you build the road.

That's why I don't see bodywork and exercise as competing approaches. They can be incredibly complementary.

When Pain Keeps Coming Back, It’s Time to Look Deeper

Not every session needs to be a full-body investigation.

Sometimes your neck hurts and you have a huge week ahead of you, and honestly?

Let's make your neck feel better.

That's a completely valid goal.

But when something keeps coming back, or you've already tried treating the same painful area over and over without lasting change, that's usually my cue to start looking beyond the symptom.

First, we can triage what's hurting.

Then we can start asking why it happened.

And ultimately, the goal is to help you get back to using your body with more movement, strength, and confidence, not just waiting for the next time that same spot starts hurting again.

This is the approach I take with clients at my Santa Rosa bodywork practice: address what hurts, figure out what may be contributing to it, and help you get back to doing the things you want to do.