This one’s an unusual one but Russ wrote to us via e-mail and asked, “I was brought up not to make mountains of molehills. Recently, I’ve found that my back pain has become a daily event. Is it OK to ignore this, while I can?”

I Know Where You’re Coming From

My father raised me to believe that being a man meant keeping quiet and never making a fuss. That we were supposed to just deal with things ourselves. Do you know where my dad is now?

He’s gone. He passed away when he was just 54. I was barely out of college when he departed.

Do you know why he’s gone? He ignored the symptoms of prostate cancer until it was too late to be treated.

Now, I don’t ignore anything. I’ve got health insurance and I am not afraid to use it.

Pain Is Nature’s Warning System

Chronic pain sucks but it is supposed to serve a purpose. It is nature’s early warning system. It tells us that something is wrong so that we can take action (like talking to our physician).

If we ignore the pain, it rarely goes away. It gets worse. We may come to tolerate it but it’s always there. Then, one day, we lose the ability to switch the pain off at all. That’s right, many people with chronic pain don’t have anything demonstrably wrong with them anymore.

Yet, their nerves keeping screaming and leaving them in pain anyway. You cannot undo this easily once it is done.

Living with Pain is not something that is “manly”. Even if we were brought up to believe it is. I owe it to my wife, my children and to my employees to be in the best state that I can be.  So do you Russ.

So, please talk to your doctor about your pain today.