If you’ve been diagnosed with a soft tissue problem, your central nervous system must be “calmed down” before you can be treated. Here’s why: treatment of soft tissue pain involves stretching and strengthening your muscles and ligaments, a process that requires significant force from your physical therapist in order to be effective. This manipulation of your inflamed tissues is painful; if the nervous system is also “fired up,” it will be intolerable.

To start the process of calming your system, look at the DOCC Project and consider how to apply it to your own situation. Here are the first four parts of the program:

• Sleep
• Meds
• Education
• Goal Setting

All four of these factors impact the central nervous system, and they all need to be addressed. Leaving even one out will negatively effect your outcome. (Note: a fifth part of the program, stress management, is a crucial part of decreasing the sensitivity of the nervous system. The whole middle part of the book will be devoted to it.)

The central nervous systems issues are about programming not psychology.  The techniques to break up and reprogram your circuits involve specific techniques.

BF