Pain is a messenger

Nobody likes pain. Well, there are a few twisted individuals who do, but for most of us if we smack our shins against a table, we're not gonna enjoy it. Understandably, most of us want to live pain-free lives. Pills to kill various kinds of pain is a huge business.

There are certain situations where you shouldn't try to immediately drown the pain. Pain is your body's way of telling you something is wrong. Awhile back I started having random moments of pain in my left knee. Some days were worse than others, but it never really went away. Someone suggested that using Icy Hot would help with the pain.

This is the wrong way to think when dealing with newly discovered pain. I shouldn't be worrying about what product I can use to make the pain go away, I should be worried about what was causing it in the first place. If you treat the source, the symptoms will go away. So I went to a doctor specializing in sports medicine because they see knee injuries all the time.

He took X-rays to confirm, but he was pretty much able to tell what was wrong just by looking. It seems my kneecaps had drifted slightly off to opposite sides because the outer thigh muscle was pulling harder than the other thigh muscle.They were no longer floating in the middle like it was supposed to. To correct this, he showed me leg exercises I could do to strengthen the weaker muscle and pull the kneecaps back into place. I did them whenever I was in an elevator by myself or at home watching TV. A few months later, the pain went away, permanently.

The moral of this story -- treat the cause, not the symptom. That pain is trying to tell you something, you should probably listen.