If your muscles ache, feel tense, cause you pains: shooting pains, dull pain, numbness or tingling. If you have loss of function and can't do something you used to be able to do. If you can't sit quietly because your muscles ache to move to relieve tense joints. If you have headaches, backaches, neck pain, pain when you bend or chew.

If you feel ill at ease in your body. If your joints are wearing out faster than they should. If your muscles feel knotty, if they twitch or spasm. If any of these are true for you, then your muscles are not as healthy as they should be for a long productive life.

Pain is essential to our survival. It is how the body communicates with the brain about urgent matters: inflammation, disease, threat potential of losing a limb, any "danger". This system, called nociception, conveys information from the limbs and parts of the body to the spinal cord and brain. When you feel pain, listen! Your body is trying to tell you something.

Many people see me for massage when a muscle simply won't do what they want it to anymore. Either that or it hurts so much "they have to do something about it". When I ask them, "did you hurt this recently" (which would be acute pain), they often say, "Oh, that (shoulder, hip, wrist), has hurt as long as I can remember." And I ask, "what do you do that helps?" And they will answer, "Oh, I take a lot of aspirin", or "I had physical therapy one time", or "I had a massage once that helped for a while."

They have chronic pain. Pain that has existed for years, pain they can't remember NOT having, pain that varies in intensity but never really goes away.

2007 © Lisa Henderson, NC-LMBT #4665. This article not to be copied for commercial use.