Pain Is The Last Signal

Pain gets all the attention, but we’ve found it’s usually the last signal your body sends, not the first. We open with a simple idea that flips the usual “treat the symptom” approach on its head: when your nervous system is off, everything can start to slide, including sleep, digestion, energy, anxiety, and recovery. If you’ve ever wondered why you can feel “not right” long before anything shows up on a scan, this conversation is for you.

We walk through Nerves 101 in plain language, from the brain and spinal cord to the peripheral nerves that act like high-speed communication lines. Then we tackle one of the internet’s favorite searches: the pinched nerve. You’ll hear the real-world progression from tingling to numbness to pain, and why weakness can be the most serious sign of interference. From there we dig into neuritis, nerve inflammation that can create burning, hypersensitivity, and weird facial sensations that scare people even after they’re cleared for major medical emergencies.

We also get honest about symptom-based care. Pain meds, muscle relaxers, ice, and heat can help you cope, but they don’t necessarily restore nerve communication or long-term resilience. We explain what “healing” means through a nervous system lens, how chiropractic adjustments aim to reduce interference and improve function, and why we use tools like heart rate variability, thermography, and static EMG to assess the autonomic nervous system.

If you care about nervous system health, natural healing, and getting to the root cause of chronic pain, fatigue, or brain fog, press play. Subscribe for weekly episodes, share this with someone stuck in the symptom loop, and leave a review with the biggest takeaway you’re applying this week.

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Transcript

Pain Is A Late Warning

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Most people think pain is the problem. It's not. Pain is the last signal in your body, not the first. The real issue? Your nervous system. It's not working the way it's supposed to. And when your nerves are off, everything from pain, digestion, sleep, energy, even anxiety can start to break down. Today we're talking about what nerves actually do, what happens when they're damaged or irritated, and how your body can heal with nerve when nerve function is restored. Welcome back to another episode of Living a Full Life. I'm Dr. Enrico Dolcikori. And this week we're going through nerves 101 and all the issues that can happen when nerves get interfered with. Your nervous system is the underlying master control system of the entire human body. Your brain is the command center, your spinal cord is the superhighway, and your nerves are the communication lines. And in that electrical network is a vast communication network unmatched in the universe. It is the speeds are ridiculous. The amount of communication that happens per second is unbelievable. The amount of information in every nerve cell or cell in the human body exceeds terabytes and terabytes of information that you can download on any platform or computer. And every single function in your body runs through nerves. Your heart's beating right now, you're breathing air in, you're expelling CO2 out, muscles are moving, organs are functioning, immune system is responding to every little thing you come in contact with. If the signal is clear, the body works properly. If the signal is distorted, dysfunction begins. Your body doesn't need help healing, it needs no interference. This is the basic premise of I think natural healthcare altogether is that if we keep the system clear, the body's programmed natural ability that you came downloaded with when you were born is to heal itself. No surgeon in the world would ever perform a surgery if they did not believe in this number one premise that the body heals itself. Because as soon as they cut you open, how would they that that cut heal? And that is what we're going through today. And giving people hope, no matter what you're going through, that your body can heal itself. And the reason why it slows down over time is not necessarily age. We don't slow down the healing process just because time moves on. We slow down the healing process because of the amount of baggage that's put on the human body over time. It's called stress. And stress comes in physical, chemical, and emotional and mental angles that attack us at every single moment of every single day. So nerves can get compressed. This is the most common searched uh thing all over the internet about nerve pain. It says pinched nerve. People will go to the internet and say, I think I have a pinched nerve, or I have a pinched nerve, it hurts. And the results that come for that are very direct and structural. So when a nerve gets irritated or compressed on, which is possible, poor posture, like phones and desks, injuries from car accidents or sports, repetitive stress, spinal misalignments, these can all lead to pinch nerves, what we call pinch nerves, pain, numbness, tingling, weakness. The nerve is like a fiber optic cable, whether we're talking about peripheral nerves, small nerves, branch nerves, nerve roots, um, central nervous system nerves, nerve tracts, they are like fiber optic cables. And you got to think of these cables as these squishy, highly integrated nerve fibers that run through like a cable, like an extension cord, or whatever you want to make the analogy of. And when that nerve is touched with even the lightest amount of pressure, it has sensation immediately. So right when you touch the nerve, you will get a tingling sensation. So right when you touch it, the superficial layer will cause a tingling. It's it's this radiating, kind of like people say ants crawling on my skin, that, or you've ever fallen asleep on your arm and you wake up and your hands that got that tingling feeling. And as the blood flows to it, it gets even more tingly for a while, and you're like, oh my gosh, and it lasts a few seconds, and then it all starts to go away when the blood flows to it. That's compression of a nerve, and that's more circulation to the nerve being choked off. But the first symptoms of pinched nerve is that tingling. That's a light pressure. Let's say the pressure's more, maybe from inflammation. You got hit with a hockey puck in the elbow and now it's bruised and swollen, and now there's even more pressure on there. Now we may feel numbness. That's the next amount of pressure that goes on that fiber optic cable is numbness. We pass the tingling, we're now into numbness. The fingers might feel numb, or we go into pain if there's enough pressure on that nerve, even more. So the point I'm trying to make is when we have a pinched nerve, by the time we feel pain, we've had the pinch for a while because that inflammation's been building up, or whatever space occupying lesion, whatever is occupying that space, whether it's inflammation, edema, hematoma, which is a bruise, uh, whatever is starting to fill up the space and compressing the nerves, muscle spasm can constrict on nerves. Um, whatever is going on, by the time we feel pain, we've passed the first two alarm sets. The first alarm was numbness, uh tingling, the second one was numbness. Now we're into pain. And then the more pressure we put on the nerve, the more the pain intensifies to a certain point. Once we have too much pressure on the nerve, the pain subsides. We know we no longer have numbness, tingling, pain, or anything. We now move into motor function issues where we get weakness. Now the muscles that it controls and the organs that those nerves control start to weaken because the information is now being critically interfered with to that point. Weakness. So pinch nerves are never the best thing to Google or search on the internet because they're just a structural possibility. And very rarely is it a structural possibility, like a space occupying lesion. In medicine, we look at space occupying lesions critically because we want to make sure that if there is something including on the space, that it's not a tumor, a growth, benign, malignant. Like we're going straight to pathology. Uh, but typically it's some type of inflammation. And no diagnostic imaging really picks up minor inflammation, it just shows up traumatic inflammation inflammation. So pinch nerve is rarely the correct answer. But the number one reason people call our office or walk to the urgent care or do anything is because they feel like they have a pinch nerve. And sometimes the minor pinch nerves can be the most debilitating for people where they cannot turn their neck. They are crying when they walk into the office, they cannot move. They are like, my neck is pinched, I cannot move. Um, and they're in a lot, and they're in a lot of pain because of just a bad night's sleep. They wake up that way. They're like, I literally woke up and within 10 to 15 minutes, this thing just continued to get worse. And now I cannot move my neck. I am in pain. When did that start? They're like four days ago. I'm like, You've been doing this for four days. Where were you? What are you doing? And there's and they're suffering. And they come on in, we find where the where the inflammation is rooted from, either a capsulitis along the nerve root, a facet joint capsulitis, um, nerve root impingement. Very rarely is it a muscle that's causing it uh from being tight or anything like that. It's usually the nerve got irritated and now the muscle's into spasm. But long story short, they come on in as soon as we can remove that inflammation, whether it's by uh grass and passive muscle technique, laser therapy, whatever it is that we can get there the fastest, get any amount of decrease in inflammation, they immediately get relief. Within moments, they're 30, 50, 75% better. And as we work through that over the next few minutes, uh, we can get them to 80, 90% better. And then the body does the rest, removes the inflammation, and they're back to normal. So that's the pinched nerve. But neuritis is nerve inflammation. And I think that's what the majority of this podcast is going to be is neuritis. The things and the pathologies that can affect nerves that cause the inflammation of the nerve or inflammation around the nerve that cause many conditions. Neuritis is different. Neuritis is now the nerve is being attacked. There are severe uh neurological disorders and pathologies that, when the nerves are attacked, can kill the nerves, deaden the nerves, and cause major issues like multiple sclerosis, Lugaric's disease, ALS, Parkinson's. Now we start getting into the brain matter, which is all nerves, and you have all the brain conditions that can happen as well. We can be here all day in neurology 201 talking about pathology, but that's not the point of the podcast. Neuritis or nerve inflammation is a burning sensation, hypersensitivity, and chronic irritation over time. It's the hypersensitivity I want people to listen to. And that's probably why you're going to share this podcast with someone because they describe something like I can't, you know, I can't feel a sensation on this side of my face, my tongue's going numb, this ear feels weird, this side of my neck. Typically, it's facial that starts to scare people. Uh, because when it comes to the face, we start thinking about stroke and cardiovascular and all these other things too. But once they go and get cleared and they had all the scans, guess who they call next? Me. And they come into our office and they're like, listen, none of the other doctors are giving me any answers here. Uh, but this is weird. I've got this numbness going along the upper cheek, all the way to my ear. Uh, I can't sleep on it. It feels weird. Uh, sometimes it's got a sharp pain. So this hypersensitivity and this chronic irritation over time. I'm like, how long have you been suffering? This nine months, a year, two years, five years. I'm like, oh my goodness. Um, let's check what's going on. It's the silent dysfunction that's the most dangerous. It's the ones we can't feel in neurology. This is what people miss. There's no pain. There's no pain, but we start getting digestive issues, chronic fatigue, hormonal imbalance, poor sleep, brain fog. I can I can sit here all the time, all day, talking about all the things that can happen. You can have serious nerve interference with zero pain. Please let that settle in for a second. We talk about this amazing nervous system that we have in the body and how it maps out everything. Every point on your body, you can feel a sensation. If you just simply glide your finger on your skin, you can feel that. If you poke yourself with a pen, you can feel that. If you walk along uh a thorn bush, you can feel that. The deeper the sensation, the more the pain response. We have this beautifully mapped out. We know that the nervous system is a super highway of information from the brain to the body and also from the body back to the brain. And a lot of our organs are not covered in sensational nerves, meaning the organs in our body don't have the nerve endings mapped out for sensation. Imagine if your heart had all these sensory nerves around it, and you could feel every heartbeat. Whatever that would feel like, you could feel it like boom, bump, like squeezing your thumb every half a second, and you felt that in your chest all the time. That would be annoying for your whole life to feel going to sleep, and you could just feel feel something in your chest, or your lungs stretch every time you took a deep breath in, like a stretching feeling, or your kidneys filtering water, or that's why our organs don't have these sensory nerves to them. We're designed that way. So we don't have to feel all that stuff all the time. Even severe trauma to a kidney or or liver where it is punctured or broken, a rib breaks and it goes into the lung. The pain comes from the broken rib and the muscle injury. Once it punctures the liver or the or the um lungs, the pain isn't coming from the organ. The pain's coming from the trauma, the damage that happened to the superficial tissue. That's where we have most of our sensation. So we can't feel that, which is kind of dangerous. But also a mechanism in the animal kingdom, when an organ is injured fatally like that. That I mean a liver puncture like that is pretty quickly fatal. A lung not so much. The adrenals release all tons of adrenaline and calm, calm, and then there's a calming sensation there. So the animal can just die peacefully in the tiger's mouth. Like there's a system for that. Now, when we think of it for humans, we're like, well, nothing eats us. Well, well, that's right. So, but we still have that mapped into us as well. So, no pain uh can still be serious nerve interference. We talked about like when a nerve gets pinched and how we can start to lose muscle function. That's a common one. Starts to scare people, like I got a weak hand, my left hand since hand, I can't have my grip strength starting to go away. And we we we are aware of that symptom and we start to get worried. However, the same nerves that supply your arm, uh C4, C5, C6 that go down into your hand, supply your thyroid, your upper cardiac branch. They are being impinged as well. Your thyroid is now not functioning as well. Doesn't mean your hand has to go numb or hurt for your thyroid to not work either. Nerve inflammation affects everywhere on everything on the superhighway, every exit on I-75 from Marco Island all the way to Traverse City, Michigan, from south to north. Every exit of the nervous system can be affected if we have inflammation at certain exit points in Georgia, in Kentucky, in Illinois, wherever the 75 goes up. So that is what we're talking about here is the silence of the nervous system. Pain is the late symptom. Pain shows up when the body is overwhelmed. Before pain, the body goes through stages of dysfunction, compensation, breakdown, then pain. Most people only act on stage four. Then I tell them, listen, we need to do this and this, and then at home, you need to do this and this. It's gonna take this long to start to feel better, weeks. It's gonna take this long to start to get better, months, and it's gonna take this long to reverse it and get you back to an optimal state, year, z. Year or years, singular or plural. And they just can't wrap their head around that. But the truth about the human body is that's how it works. So we've been conditioned into believing a magic pill, a magic surgery, a magic procedure, a magic regenerative injection is going to change it instantaneously, and that's not how we work. So doing this and thinking this way is like waiting for your engine to explode before checking the oil. All the clues start to pop up. The first one's check engine. No, sorry, the first one is oil change. That's the first thing that pops up the oil change light or your oil uh functions low. And you ignore it, then the check engine light starts to come on, and then you ignore it. What's gonna happen when that oil thickens and it starts to circulate in the engine for too long at high temperature? Well, the engine's gonna seize, and we wait for that long, and that's where we start to say, Hey, fix me. It's much easier to just change the oil. Chiropractic restores function better and more efficiently than any other modality in medicine. Because by the time we get to late pathology, it's no longer a chiropractic issue. It's now medical intervention, surgery, medicine, whatever it may be. We're talking about how this is more than just cracking backs, it's about removing interference from the nervous system. When the spine is properly aligned, pressure is taken off the central nervous system nerve roots along the spinal column that starts the peripheral nervous system. This is called our electrical fuse box. It's where every single branch of the peripheral nervous system starts, just like the electrical fuse box in your house. That's where every fuse to every outlet and every appliance and every light in your home comes from. And we can map it by labeling it and knowing what part of the house these nerves are going to. It's the same thing through there. So when the spine is properly aligned, it's like your fuse is all being turned on. Pressure is taken off the nerves, inflammation decreases, and communication improves almost instantaneously after a spinal chiropractic adjustment. And then the body does what it's designed to do, heal. It happens after it. This is why when people leave, I know the work is just getting started. The body is going to heal tonight during a good night's sleep. It's going to start to heal, it's going to continue to heal tomorrow and onward and onward and onward as long as we keep the interference off of the nervous system. We're not fixing the body, we're allowing it to function again. And that's the beauty behind it. So symptom-based care is how we're all trained. Why go see a doctor? Why do anything if I don't need them? That's a logical way to think. Why go spend the money? Why waste the time? Why go check them? And honestly, if you went to your primary care provider and say, hey, Dr. Sally, um, what brings me in today is nothing. I actually feel super well. I was hoping you could uh confirm that for me. That'd actually be a pretty smart question. Uh, what what can you do for me? They're just gonna stare at you and be like, Why are you here? I have a busy schedule. What are you doing? What are you doing here? Or maybe they'll do some wellness tests on you, check you, check, check, check your blood, your urine, and your heart, and do some vitals and uh your blood pressure, and you're on your way. That's called your annual physical, right? That's why we go there. Uh, but in the in the medical field, in the primary field, there, I mean, there's really nothing for them to do. They're waiting for something to happen to try and solve or help you solve. And that system is pretty much the authoritarian system when we think of healthcare around the world mostly, except some parts of the world where they do not think like that. They think, oh man, I need more sleep. Oh, I need better nutrition. Oh, I need to rest. Oh, I need to drink more water. And they start with the basics. There's parts of the world that start there before they get to that. So the temporary fixes when we stick to neurology and nerves is pain meds. That's the first thing to decrease pain. And how pain meds work is they block receptors in the brain that sense pain. That's it. So you're really flooding it with a chemical, goes to the brain, blocks the receptors or many of the receptors to diminish or reduce the amount of pain. It's how Aleve, Advil, ibuprofen, tylenol, it's how these things all work. They block the sensation, the receptors that sense pain. Um, muscle relaxers. Typically, these are given together. Muscle relaxers and pain meds to help relax the muscle and decrease the pain. And then ice and heat. That's a more of a therapeutic type of remedy. And these are temporary fixes because they don't actually resolve the interference that's happening on the nerve that's causing the sensation. They may reduce symptoms, but it doesn't restore function. Real healing restores nerve communication, improves adaptability, and builds long-term resilience afterwards. If your nervous system is not functioning properly, you cannot express full health. That's what we talk about when we talk about optimal health. And in our office, we do a neuroscore on every new patient that comes in from birth, whether they're an infant all the way to 99 years of age. We scan them with heart rate variability, thermography, and static EMG testing to get nerve function testing as quickly and as efficiently as we can without putting the patient through anything crazy like needles, nerve conductance testing, and all the other stuff you can do. There's many ways of doing this, but these are three basic tests that can give us a quick glimpse of the autonomic nervous system to see how it's functioning, how balanced it is. So you can't express full health if you're not fully healthy. And we can't get to peak energy, we can't get to optimal performance, and we can't get to true healing unless the system is as clear as we can possibly make it. Health isn't about how you feel, it's about how well your body functions. That's what I want you to take away with on this podcast and share this because this is the nitty-gritty of what not only we do, but most chiropractors do, and the specialties that we get into to help certain people with certain things in many different conditions. Uh, if you're dealing with pain, numbness, tingling, even the fatigue things, gut issues, or just not feeling yourself, I feel like the pyramids inverted when it comes to health care. You should not be going straight to a muscle problem or a pain med. You should be Getting your nervous system checked. And you say, Well, hey, man, you're a chiropractor. Of course, you're saying that. I mean, you're kind of biased when it comes to it. Not really, when you think about the hierarchy of healing in the body, the foundational principle of how the body heals is with a clear central nervous system. Well, whole nervous peripheral as well. A whole nervous system has to be clear so that all the information that's going back and forth is clear and fine-tuned, and the systems and procedures towards healing are clear. That is how this all works for healing and optimization in the body. So share this. This one's a share one. Subscribe to the channel so you get the updates every Tuesday on our release for every week. That's when the podcast drops. And stay well, stay healthy. And if you have any information, you can always email us or questions at infow at fulllifetampa.com.