Pain is the Lowest Bar

How My Chiropractic Story Began... on the Jiu Jitsu Mat

By Dr. James

One of my training partners was a chiropractor, and over time I realized that nearly every conversation we had eventually returned to health, performance, adaptation, and the question of what it meant to live well within a human body. Our perspectives were aligned in many ways, but he possessed a language for the nervous system that I had not yet developed. He spoke of it as the organizing system of the body, the system through which we receive information, interpret our environment, coordinate our actions, and adapt to the demands placed upon us.

At the time, I was not entirely convinced.

I had grown up within the conventional medical model, and I understood the body primarily in terms of its component parts. A problem could be identified, isolated, treated, removed, replaced, repaired, or managed. It was an appealing framework because it suggested that the body could be understood much like a machine. Find the malfunctioning piece, correct it, and normal function should return. Even then, however, I sensed that this explanation was incomplete. Human beings are not collections of independent tissues functioning in isolation. We are integrated organisms, and every part of us is in constant communication with every other part.

At the time I did not have a coherent philosophy of chiropractic, but I was beginning to recognize that health had to involve more than whether a particular structure appeared damaged or whether a symptom had temporarily disappeared.

Then, as life would have it, I drove into a tree.

It does sound more dramatic than it really was; I hit a patch of black ice, drifted off the road, and collided with a tree. I spilled my Starbucks. I was evaluated at the hospital under my father’s insistence, and there was no great medical emergency. Nothing appeared catastrophically wrong. I went home, continued with my life, and expected the experience to become an insignificant story about winter driving.

Except something felt different.

My breathing no longer moved through my body smoothly. Sleeping on my side felt unfamiliar. My movement in Jiu-Jitsu had subtly changed, though I could not pinpoint exactly how. I did not have a dramatic pain complaint that fit neatly into a diagnostic category, but I knew that something was off. There was a difference between the body I had inhabited before the accident and the body I was living in afterward.

When I told my training partner, he invited me to come into his office and be evaluated.

That first visit forced me to reconsider what I believed I knew about my own body. As we moved through my history, I began to recognize that the accident was only one of many inputs. I had accumulated years of athletic injuries, academic stress, strength training, competition, repetitive movement, poor recovery, and the thousands of experiences that occur when a person continually asks the body to perform without ever pausing to ask how it has accommodated those demands.

As I began getting adjusted, my immediate complaint began to improve, but that was not the most interesting part of the experience. What surprised me was discovering limitations I had never identified as such. My neck did not move through a complete range of motion. My shoulder mechanics were not as functional as I assumed. My lower back and pelvis possessed very little mobility. I had played sports throughout my life, competed at a high level, trained Jiu-Jitsu, lifted weights, and considered myself physically capable. Yet much of my movement was being produced through compensation.

I was functional, but I was not functioning well.

There is an important difference between those two conditions, and it is a distinction that has shaped nearly everything I now believe about health.

Human beings are extraordinarily adaptable. We can organize ourselves around restriction, instability, exhaustion, fear, injury, and stress. We can become competent inside patterns that are far from ideal. We can learn to move around what does not move, recruit muscles that were never intended to perform a particular job, alter our breathing to accommodate tension, and normalize states of internal stress because those states have become familiar.

Adaptation allows us to survive, but adaptation is not always synonymous with health.

At first, my chiropractor would finish the visit by telling me to return the following week. Then, after some time, neither of us needed to discuss it. I simply came back. Chiropractic became part of my life, not because I was perpetually injured or preoccupied with symptoms, but because I was beginning to understand that my perception of “normal” had been remarkably limited.

About six months into care, I experienced an adjustment that remains vivid in my memory.

My chiropractor had worked with my pelvis repeatedly, but on this particular day something changed. There was a release through my lower back and pelvis, followed by a rush of sensation that felt almost disproportionate to the simplicity of the adjustment itself. I remember the sound that came out of me, the surprise, and the immediate sense that an area of my body I had never consciously identified as painful was suddenly free.

That was the moment I understood something I have repeated many times since:

I did not know I was in pain until I was out of it.

That sentence requires some explanation because it is easy to interpret it too literally. I was not walking through life in obvious agony. I was training, working, studying, socializing, and doing all of the things I believed a healthy person should be able to do. What I had failed to recognize was the extent to which tension, restriction, altered movement, and neurological guarding had become incorporated into my baseline experience.

The body had adapted, and my conscious awareness had adapted with it.

Later that day, I was walking past a Chase Bank in Manhattan. At the time, many of their branches had metallic blue coverings across the windows. As I passed one of those reflective panels, I sensed someone close to my right shoulder. I turned abruptly, expecting to find another person beside me.

Instead, It was my reflection. I stopped and looked at myself. I was standing so differently that I did not recognize myself. My chest was more open. My pelvis was no longer held in the same chronic forward position. My eyes were oriented higher. As someone who is five feet four inches tall, I am always willing to appreciate every available fraction of an inch, but this was not simply about appearing taller. The entire relationship between my body and the environment had changed. My posture had altered the position of my head, the orientation of my eyes, and the way I encountered the horizon.

My perspective had literally changed.

That moment has stayed with me because it illustrated something that I would later study through psychology, neurology, exercise science, and chiropractic: we do not experience the world independently of the body. Our physical state influences what we notice, how we move, how we orient, what we interpret as threatening, and how much energy we have available to respond. Perception is not a disembodied mental event. It is shaped by sensory information, previous experience, expectation, posture, movement, breathing, and nervous system state.

The world had not changed when I walked past that window. I had changed, and therefore the world appeared different.

This is one reason I have never been satisfied with defining chiropractic solely through pain relief. Pain matters. It can be overwhelming, disruptive, exhausting, and frightening. It can narrow a person’s attention until life becomes organized around avoiding the next movement, the next headache, the next spasm, or the next flare. Helping someone move out of that experience is meaningful work, and I would never minimize it.

But pain is the lowest bar by which we can evaluate the effectiveness of a care plan.

It is the most obvious metric, not necessarily the most important one.

Asking only whether a person hurts less is similar to evaluating an athlete exclusively by whether they survived the competition. Survival matters, but it does not tell us how well they moved, how intelligently they responded, how efficiently they recovered, or whether their performance reflected their actual capacity.

The absence of pain does not necessarily indicate the presence of health. It may simply indicate that the nervous system is not currently producing a pain experience intense enough to capture conscious attention.

Many people arrive in our office with symptoms, but symptoms are rarely the entirety of their story. They may also be sleeping poorly, holding their breath, struggling to recover from exercise, living in a state of constant muscular tension, feeling overwhelmed by ordinary demands, or moving through life with a level of fatigue they have accepted as normal. They may not describe themselves as unwell because they have remained productive. They still go to work, care for their children, exercise, manage their homes, and meet their responsibilities.

Functioning, however, is not the same as thriving.

I recognize this pattern in myself. Before chiropractic became a regular part of my life, I did not fully appreciate the extent to which my focus, movement, digestion, breathing, and ability to settle were influenced by my physical and neurological state. I had been diagnosed with ADHD in my twenties, and I am not suggesting that chiropractic erased that diagnosis or that adjustments constitute a treatment for ADHD.

What I observed was more personal and more nuanced. When my body felt regulated, when I was not managing unnecessary physical tension, and when I could sit comfortably inside myself, sustained attention became easier. I was more capable of beginning a task and remaining with it. When I became scattered, restless, and pulled in several directions at once, I often noticed that I was also physically dysregulated.

Erin notices it too.

There are days when I move through the house like a chicken with its head cut off, beginning six tasks and completing none of them (as you can imagine, she loves these days). There are other days when I can sit down, organize my thoughts, and produce meaningful work without feeling compelled to escape my own chair. Chiropractic is not the only variable involved in that difference, but it is one of the tools that has helped me recognize and influence my own state.

That distinction is central to how I practice.

I am not interested in presenting chiropractic as a cure-all. Human health is far too complex for that kind of intellectual laziness. Sleep matters. Nutrition matters. Movement matters. Strength matters. Relationships matter. Psychological safety matters. Purpose matters. Environment matters. Manual therapy, massage, mobility work, and intentional recovery can all play meaningful roles. The health of a human being cannot be reduced to one profession, one intervention, one adjustment, or one theory.

Yet I have also become convinced that nervous system regulation is foundational because every other input must ultimately be perceived, interpreted, and integrated through the nervous system.

The nervous system does not merely respond to life. It helps construct our experience of it.

When a person is chronically operating from a state of threat, the world is filtered through that state. Ordinary demands may feel urgent. Neutral sensations may be interpreted as danger. Rest may feel uncomfortable. Stillness may produce anxiety. The muscles remain prepared for a threat that never fully arrives, breathing becomes shallow or guarded, and recovery becomes increasingly difficult.

Conversely, regulation does not mean remaining passive, calm, or relaxed at all times. That would be neither healthy nor adaptive. A well-regulated nervous system must be capable of generating intensity when intensity is required. It should mobilize us to fight, flee, protect, compete, perform, and respond decisively when the environment demands it. It should also allow us to return from that state when the threat or challenge has passed.

The goal is not permanent relaxation. The goal is range and the ability to adapt appropriately.

A healthy nervous system should be able to move into activation without becoming trapped there. It should be able to rest without collapsing. It should be able to recognize a genuine threat, respond appropriately, and then return to a state in which digestion, recovery, connection, learning, creativity, and repair can occur.

This is what I mean when I speak about human optimization.

Optimization is not about becoming superhuman. It is not biohacking our way out of the ordinary limitations of being alive. It is not a refusal to age, suffer, grieve, become tired, or encounter difficulty. It is the process of improving our ability to meet reality with an appropriate response.

Reaction is automatic. Response contains choice.

When the nervous system is overwhelmed, the space between stimulus and behavior becomes very small. We become reactive, defensive, impulsive, withdrawn, or frozen. When the system has greater capacity, that space widens. We are more capable of responding with discernment. We can remain present long enough to determine whether the situation in front of us is actually dangerous, merely uncomfortable, or simply unfamiliar.

That shift can influence far more than whether someone reports pain.

It can change the way a person parents.

It can change the way they communicate with a spouse.

It can change how they recover from training, how they tolerate uncertainty, how they manage conflict, and how they experience their own body. When people tell us that they feel more patient, more grounded, more capable of adapting, or more like themselves, I do not dismiss those observations because they do not fit neatly on a numerical pain scale.

The same philosophy applies across the different populations we serve at Flower of Life. An athlete may first enter the office because something hurts, but pain relief alone does not fully address the demands of sport. The athlete must be able to organize movement, absorb force, produce force, breathe efficiently, recover between efforts, and remain adaptable under pressure. A body that is merely pain-free but incapable of responding intelligently to changing conditions is not optimized for performance.

A new mother may not describe her experience primarily through pain. She may speak about feeling disconnected from her body, unable to take a full breath, perpetually alert, emotionally exhausted, or unable to settle even when the baby is sleeping. Pregnancy, labor, birth, medical interventions, disrupted sleep, feeding demands, and the enormous psychological transition into motherhood all represent profound inputs to the nervous system.

Care for that mother should not be reduced to whether her back hurts.

We must be willing to consider the whole person: how she breathes, how she moves, how she rests, how safe she feels in her own body, and whether she has enough internal capacity to meet the relentless demands of caring for another human being.

The same is true for babies.

Infants are not miniature adults, and they should not be evaluated according to adult expectations. Their nervous systems are developing through movement, sensation, feeding, bonding, visual orientation, vestibular input, touch, sound, and the experience of safety with their caregivers. A baby who consistently turns the head in only one direction is not merely demonstrating a preference in the same way an adult may prefer one side of a pillow. That pattern can influence how the child encounters and explores the environment.

A tense baby is not simply a “strong baby.”

Babies are supposed to be vulnerable. They are supposed to soften into the arms of the people who care for them. They require the ability to feed, sleep, move, orient, bond, and gradually develop a relationship with their bodies and the world around them. When an infant appears persistently uncomfortable, rigid, asymmetrical, or unable to settle, our concern extends beyond whether the baby is crying. We are interested in the conditions through which development is unfolding.

That is why I continue to receive chiropractic care when I am not in pain. It is why Erin has helped keep me functioning through fifteen years of Jiu-Jitsu, training, work, fatherhood, stress, travel, injury, and the ordinary wear of being a human being who asks a great deal of his body. I do not wait until I am incapacitated to become interested in my health.

I return to chiropractic because I understand the difference between the absence of crisis and the presence of capacity.

I want to move well before movement becomes painful. I want to recover before exhaustion becomes burnout. I want to recognize dysregulation before it begins directing my behavior. I want to maintain access to the widest possible range of physical, neurological, and psychological responses so that I can meet the demands of my life with greater clarity.

At Flower of Life Chiropractic, we are not satisfied with asking only whether you feel better. We want to understand how you function, how you adapt, how you recover, how you perceive your environment, and how fully you can participate in your own life.

We are not in the business of chasing symptoms from one part of the body to another.

We are interested in helping the athlete perform without being consumed by compensation, helping the mother inhabit her body with greater ease, helping the child develop with as little interference as possible, and helping the exhausted adult rediscover that survival is not the highest level of human function.

I cannot promise that every person will experience the kind of dramatic moment I had at that Chase Bank window. Human beings are too individual, and health is too complex, for promises of that kind. But I remain fascinated by what becomes possible when a person’s relationship with their body changes.

I will always care whether someone is in pain. I will always celebrate when a practice member can return to the activities, responsibilities, and people they love without being limited by discomfort. But pain is not the summit of our work. It is the ground floor.

The larger goal is adaptability.

The larger goal is capacity.

The larger goal is helping human beings become more fully available to their own lives.

We are not merely in the “feel better” business.

We are in the business of human optimization through nervous system regulation, not because human beings need to become something artificial or extraordinary, but because so many people have never been given the opportunity to discover how capable they already are.