When the Injury Is Over but the Pain Isn't: Why Healing Gets Stuck

Maybe it was a fall, a car accident, an operation, or a back that went one morning when you bent down to pick something up. The doctor says it has healed. The X-ray looks fine. And it still hurts.

Or maybe there was never one big event. The pain came on slowly, in the neck, the lower back or the knees, and it never left.

These sound like two different problems. Chinese medicine sees them as the same one, and modern science has come to the same answer.

Where there is pain, something isn't moving

Chinese medicine has a very old saying: where things flow freely, there is no pain. Where there is pain, things are not flowing.

Your body is meant to keep everything moving. Blood and energy, which Chinese medicine calls Qi, travel to every part of you. They bring in what that area needs and carry away what it's finished with.

An injury blocks that flow for a while. As you heal, the flow is supposed to come back. Sometimes it doesn't. The area stays blocked, and a blocked area hurts.

Think of a garden hose with a kink in it. The water reaches the kink and stops. Nothing is broken. The water just can't get through.

That's why an old injury can still hurt years later. The damage isn't still happening. Something has stopped moving.

What science sees: an alarm that won't switch off

Every cell in your body runs on its own fuel. Scientists call it ATP. It's meant to stay inside the cell.

When you're injured, cells break and that fuel spills out. Once it's outside the cell, it works as an alarm. It tells your body "there's damage here, send help," and the body starts repairing.

When the repair is done, the body is meant to clear that spilled fuel away. It changes it into a calming substance that tells the area, "you can settle down now." The alarm goes off, and the pain eases.

Think of a smoke alarm. It should ring when there's smoke and stop once the smoke clears. Now picture one that keeps ringing long after the toast is finished.

That's what happens when healing gets stuck. Researchers in California describe healing as three steps: protect the area, rebuild it, then go back to normal. If the body never reaches the last step, the area stays in protect mode, and they link that to long-term pain.

Over time the nerves get used to the alarm. They become more sensitive, so even a small touch or movement can hurt more than it should.

So an injury that won't heal and pain that won't go away are really the same thing: healing that started and never finished. Something didn't clear away. Chinese medicine has been describing this as a blockage for thousands of years.

What healing needs to finish

Flow. The injured area needs fresh supplies coming in and waste going out. If the flow is poor, the clean-up is slow and the alarm keeps ringing.

A calm body. When you're stressed, your body treats everything as an emergency and puts repair off until later. In one well-known study, women under a lot of long-term stress took about nine days longer to heal from the same small cut than women who weren't under that stress.

Living with pain is stressful in itself. So the pain keeps you stressed, and the stress keeps the pain going.

Something you do, not something done to you

Breaking that circle is what Medical Qi Gong is for. Qi Gong doesn't heal you. Your body heals you. Qi Gong wakes that ability up.

Most people who come to Medical Qi Gong have already tried everything else: painkillers, physiotherapy, injections, specialists. Medical Qi Gong is often what finally makes the difference. Hospitals and pain clinics in the United States now offer Qi Gong classes for exactly this reason.

My mother is a professor of physiotherapy. She sees better results in the clients she sends to Qi Gong than in those who have physiotherapy alone.

Here's why. Think of the lights in your home. Painkillers, physiotherapy and injections work on the front end, the part of the body you can see and feel. It's like having someone come in and switch the lights on for you. It helps while they're there. Medical Qi Gong works on the wiring behind the wall, the part you can't see, so your body starts switching things on and off by itself, like a light on a timer.

Research points the same way. When researchers looked at ten studies of Qi Gong for long-term pain, some of the studies had people doing Qi Gong themselves. In others, people lay still while a Qi Gong practitioner directed Qi toward them. The people who did Qi Gong themselves had less pain. For the people who only received it, the results were mixed.

That's why Medical Qi Gong is self-care. You don't need to book appointments or wait for someone else to fix you. You can start today, at home. My students tell me they feel a difference from their very first practice.

What Medical Qi Gong does

In Chinese medicine, the aim is to get Qi and Blood moving again through the places where they've stopped. It takes the kink out of the hose.

In everyday terms, it gives your body the flow and the calm it needs to finish healing:

• It gets things flowing. Medical Qi Gong movements are designed to move Qi and Blood through every part of the body, including the places where they've got stuck. Think of squeezing a tube of toothpaste all the way from the bottom, so nothing is left behind. That's how the body clears out what an area no longer needs.
• It calms the body. In one study, older adults who did Qi Gong for twelve weeks had lower levels of stress hormones through the day, and they handled pressure more calmly.
• It switches on repair. Medical Qi Gong switches your body into its rest-and-repair mode. It also helps calm long-term inflammation and helps move the fluid that carries waste away from your tissues.

What studies have found

• Pain years after an operation: Harvard Medical School researchers worked with women who still had pain from breast cancer surgery, on average four and a half years later. After twelve weeks of Qi Gong, their pain was about half what it had been, it got in the way of daily life much less, and they could move their shoulders further. Six months later, the improvement was still there.
• Long-term pain: In that review of ten studies, people who practised Qi Gong had less pain. For those with neck pain, the relief was still there six months later.
• Lower back pain: In another large review of over a thousand people, Qi Gong reduced back pain and made everyday tasks easier.
• Fibromyalgia (pain all over the body): People practised Qi Gong every day for eight weeks. Six months later, about four or five in every ten had much less pain, compared with only one or two in ten who hadn't started yet. They also slept better and could do more.
• Pain that got worse after an injury instead of better: In a study of people whose pain had carried on long after an injury should have healed, 9 out of 10 of the people doing Qi Gong said they had less pain by the end, compared with fewer than 4 out of 10 in the other group. They also felt less anxious.

Your body already knows how to finish healing. Give it the flow it needs.

If your pain started with something frightening, like an accident, a fall or a loss, I've written about how Qi Gong helps the body heal from trauma. If you hurt a tendon or ligament, this article explains why those take so long to recover.