Injuries and Sensory Receptor Dysfunctions

Your body is constantly gathering information through specialized cells called sensory receptors.
These receptors — located throughout your body — detect pressure, stretch, vibration, temperature, light, chemical changes, and even noxious (potentially harmful) stimuli. Together, they give your brain a detailed picture of both your internal and external environment.

What most of us don’t realize is that these receptors can sometimes become dysfunctional or over-sensitized. When this happens, your nervous system may begin responding to inaccurate information — leading to compensation patterns, ongoing tension, or pain.

How does this happen?
Under normal circumstances, sensory receptors receive a stimulus and send that information to the central nervous system for processing. The brain interprets the input and coordinates an appropriate response — adjusting movement, posture, or awareness as needed.

However, consider what happens after an injury.
Let’s say you fell and injured your hip. The tissue may heal over a relatively short time period, but the receptors around that area can remain hypersensitive indefinitely — yes, indefinitely! This means your brain continues to receive input suggesting the hip is still injured, even after the tissue has healed.

To cope, your body begins to compensate.
You might unknowingly shift more weight into your opposite hip for example, which could place extra pressure on the outer edge of your foot and subtly twist your pelvis. To counterbalance this rotation, your thoracic spine (mid-back) may twist in the opposite direction. And since your eyes naturally want to stay level with the horizon, your neck might counter rotate against that twist.
Years later, you might experience chronic neck tension or pain in the outside of your foot
— when in fact, it is a cascading effect from the over-sensitized sensory receptors in your hip. Receiving treatment for your neck or foot would only ever offer a temporary solution.

The good news:
A skilled bodywork practitioner can assess your unique compensation patterns, identify dysfunctional receptors, and help restore them to their baseline state pre injury. When these receptors reset, the compensatory patterns often unwind on their own. Muscles that were “turned off” by the nervous system to protect the injury, or to facilitate a compensation pattern, can instantly reconnect and begin functioning optimally again.

A few takeaways:
Old injuries don’t simply disappear — but that doesn’t mean you have to live with pain.
The site of pain may not be the source.
Years of dysfunction and compensation can be unraveled when the right information is received, allowing the body to regain its efficiency, balance, and strength.