Recently we had a college student come into clinic to observe us, she is thinking about going on to do a degree in manual therapy so wanted to gain some insight into private practice. Whilst observing myself she commented “the nervous system seems pretty important to your treatment”, then we had a really detailed discussion about how the nervous system controls everything. I thought to myself, this would make an interesting blog post… (hopefully!)

The nervous system consists of the brain and spinal cord (central nervous system) and all of the nerves that supply the rest of our body and send information back to the spinal cord (peripheral nervous system). It is highly complex, there is always something new to learn about it so for the purpose of this blog I will try to explain how it is involved after a muscular issue has occurred.

Let’s take a hamstring strain caused by running. As the strain happens the tiny nerve endings within the muscle register the stretch and relay this information to the spinal cord, specialised nerve fibres and substances will send the information up to the brain. The brain then decides whether to interpret this information as pain. This is influenced by the amount of signal coming up through the spinal cord, previous experience of injury/pain, current level of threat amongst other things such as the amount of sleep that you’ve had.

As the muscle injury heals the amount of danger signals being sent to the brain should reduce, however this isn’t always the case, sometimes the nerve receptors remain sensitised and continue to send danger signals to the spinal cord which can be interpreted as pain. If this continues then it can lead to structural changes within the spinal cord segment meaning that a lower amount of danger signal or even a non-threatening signal triggers the same pathways so that the brain interprets pain, even if though the damage to muscle has healed.