Your body is just like a machine. When it's getting all the gas it needs and when its parts are working correctly, things are good, right? Of course they are. But, when even one tiny part gets out of whack it can throw the entire machine off. It may still work, but not as well as it could be working.



There are many causes for structural deviations in your body, and even something small can be enough to throw your whole system out of alignment. Past injuries or surgeries, congenital conditions, improper physical conditioning, your work environment, habitual postures, and muscular dysfunction or disease are leading causes for deviations in your body. And these deviations can lead to pain.

Let's look at a common example to illustrate this. Say you love playing tag football, but you only have time to do it on the weekend. So what do you do? You play long and hard on Saturdays to make up for all the time you didn't get to play during the week. What happens? Come Monday, you're hurting. Your body is aching and sore all over, you're bent over in pain, perhaps limping, and it takes you most of the week to recover.

But, by next Saturday you're out on the field doing it all over again. After all, you feel better by then, so why not?

And it doesn't even have to be injuries like we just described. Your body experiences a low-grade injury everyday that you sit hunched over your computer for 8 hours straight. Your posture, the way you walk, and thousands of other little things all contribute to your body's health.

What most people don't realize is that all of these little injuries, accidents and daily events define who you are from a musculoskeletal standpoint. Your body keeps track of everything like the best accountant, and all of these little things (and big things like surgery or auto accidents) add up over time to influence how your body functions and feels today.

Your health is a collection of current as well as past experiences. If left unattended, small aches and pains that are themselves warning signs can be tolerated and eventually ignored by the body. You learn to ?cope?, but over time your body may begin to hurt in a new and different way that can't be tolerated. Those niggling little pains were the warning signals that something was off, and although this new pain may be in a different part of your body, oftentimes it could have been avoided if the smaller problem had been addressed when it occurred.