Pain in pregnancy

Understanding pain in pregnancy - how fear and stress contribute

With growing a new human, some amount of aches and pains might make sense - your posture is changing to accommodate a new shape (and centre of mass!) and you are making room in your pelvis for a growing baby. When we are talking about chronic pelvic girdle pain in pregnancy, this goes beyond those regular aches and pain - this is persistent and debilitating pain that happens in pregnancy and the first year post-partum.

What causes pain?

We used to think that some of this pain was due to the hormone relaxin - the hormone that helps loosen our ligaments to accommodate a growing baby! But it turns out this isn’t actually very correlated. In fact, when we perpetuate this myth… women are more fearful of movement, which makes pain worse! Fear, stress, and lack of sleep actually seem to be more correlated with pelvic girdle pain.

there are different types of pain

Pain actually may come from a few different physiological sources, and the science of pain and how we perceive it is developing and helping our understanding.

Nociceptive pain is pain related to physical stress or trauma. We can pinpoint this and it usually relates quite well to actual damage of physical structures - more damage meaning more pain! Neuropathy is another form of pain in which there is an injury to a nerve, causing intense pain.

Those suffering from chronic pain or pain we can’t explain, may actually be due to nociplastic pain - pain arising from changes to our sensory pathways in the nervous system leading to amplified sensation of pain.

It can make us sense (very real pain) that is out of sync with how much damage is really happening. We see this when we look at low back pain in the general population too! MRI scans showing level of injury don’t correlate very well with level of pain. There are people who could have hugely herniated discs and feel minimal pain or dysfunction, while others have minimal herniation and are in excruciating and debilitating pain.

This isn’t “just in your head” but we know our brains are certainly involved in amplifying pain pathways that have been created.

how do we manage this?

Although it can feel counterintuitive, movement - especially novel movements - are how we can build pain free connections between the brain and body. Visualization, changing the context, relaxation techniques and movement are important in some of these chronic pain situations. Working with a practitioner who can assess your pain, movement and stability and then guide you through breathing and new pain-free movements is important.

When we help you understand your body to minimize fear, get you sleeping really well and manage stress, we can work on getting to the root of your pain to help get you feeling better. Often collaboration between our chiropractor Dr. Tannis and our naturopathic doctors, can provide the most well rounded care for your pregnancy related pain.