Dr. Aneesh Singla

Our backs may obviously experience a similar phenomenon.

And what happens a lot of times is that

as we listen to our bodies and we learn more about our bodies we become more in tune with them and when we're feeling pain we we hopefully are learning something from that message for example if you've got back pain and you're expecting to wake up with it you might change your nighttime routine you may change your bed you may change

the amount of sleep you're getting.

You may change the position that you're sleeping in.

And hopefully by modifying those aspects of your life and your routine and you're listening to your pain, you've made a modification that not only is going to help you with the pain, but also may help you in the long run because now you've taken better care of your body and you may actually experience less problems down the road.

Well, that's a great question, Mike, and I would say that it very much is an individual type of a response, and it depends on what actually is causing the pain.

I wish I could sort of generalize that, but here I'll give you a specific example.

So let's say you've got an injury and you want to mitigate that pain and you really want to try to avoid taking painkillers, as you said.

Well, you know, you obviously, first of all, need to really get a diagnosis, okay?

So say you love running, but you can't do it because you've got knee pain.

So what you want to do is get a diagnosis, see your family physician or orthopedic or physician or pain specialist like me, and, you know, get some x-rays, get some imaging, get an exam, get an understanding of what's going on.

And once you have a better idea,

of what actually is happening in your knee, you can take some steps to decrease that pain.

And that may involve medications, okay?

That could involve physical therapy to strengthen the joint, I should say the muscles and the ligaments around the joint to support it better for the activities that you want to do.

It may involve an injection of steroids into the knee or even a gel-like substance that we can do to increase the cushioning of the joint.

Or ultimately, it may involve surgery to get the problem fixed.

So those are some tools that we use in the medical field to help treat the underlying problem.

But again, we have to remember pain is a symptom.