THE MAGIC AND MISERY OF INFLAMMATION

Understanding inflammation is one of the keys to understanding any injury whether it is your back or your brain. This phenomenal process is nature’s way of responding to damage to parts of the body. Whether the damage is major or minor your body will respond with what is known as an inflammatory reaction.

The reason that this occurs is to essentially maintain life. Basically if it did not occur in a short time you would die. It is nature’s way of preventing further damage and repairing that which already occurred.

Explaining it as simply as possible. Around the site of injury blood flow is increased. This causes certain types of blood cells to be forced out of the blood vessels into the damaged area to begin the healing process. The damaged area releases chemicals that cause irritation to the nerve endings which then send messages to your brain.

Your brain interprets these as pain. This is to tell you that something is wrong and to discourage you from moving the damaged area. The increased blood flow, the irritated nerve endings and the start of the healing process cause the area to be:

WARM

SWOLLEN

PAINFUL

(AND RED IF YOU COULD SEE IT).

It will stay like this for normally 2 to 3 days. This can vary depending on the degree of trauma to the body part in question. This stage is often termed the acute stage and is essentially about damage limitation and stabilization to ensure no further damage occurs.

Following on from the first 2 or 3 days the process of structural repair begins in earnest. Your body will attempt to replace and reconstruct the area, which has been damaged. The length of time that this takes varies with many factors. Amongst these are your age, your general health, any predisposing medical conditions, the amount of damage that has occurred and how the body part is treated during this time.

During the repair process damaged structures will be repaired in one of two ways. If the damage is only minor the repair will be made with the exact same type of tissue as the original. If the damage is greater then the repair will be made with what is called scar tissue. This is a tough inelastic substance the body uses to rapidly rebuild damaged areas. Damage does not have to be that great for scar tissue to be used.

Once the healing is complete the repair process obviously stops.

To summarize: the inflammation process follows a very general pattern as follows:

1. The initial acute stage lasting 2 or 3 days when there is a lot of pain and movement restriction.

2. The second or sub-acute stage when there is a gradual decrease in the body’s activity as the healing process progresses. This lasts for up to three weeks. By this time, unless there are broken bones, the soft tissues (the muscles, ligaments and discs) as they are called have achieved a moderately strong state of repair.

3. This third stage is sometimes called the chronic stage. It is when the repair process has slowed right down. It does not equate with the healing process being satisfactorily completed however.

Each of these three stages area characterized by alterations in the symptoms you suffer. There are specific ways to treat an injury at each stage, which is a crucial point to understand and one of the keys in helping to resolve any problem.

I refer to the ‘magic and mystery’ of inflammation because just like all of nature’s ways it is truly miraculous. It is necessary to understand it and work alongside with Mother Nature in each of the stages. If you don’t, as you well know, it can be truly miserable.

Now you know that whatever the injury the process of inflammation will occur I am going to explain in detail what can happen to each of the individual structures we talked about in chapter one.

For information on how to successfully work with inflammation please click here.