Jasmine here, I’m the Clinical Naturopath at Restore Health. I’ve been working with patients experiencing chronic pain recently, so I wanted to share how naturopathy can help.
If you live with chronic pain, let’s do a quick check-in. Take a deep breath in, then a long exhale, then sigh it out.
Now let’s do a quick scan over your body from the top of your head down to your toes. See what you notice. Where is the pain? What quality does it have: sharp, dull, aching, dragging, burning? Does it radiate? What would you rate it from 1-10? Hold your answers in mind, because the quality of your pain is one of the most useful clues you have
If massage, chiropractic adjustment, rehab exercise or foam rolling have taken the edge off your pain but never quite resolved it, that’s useful information. The hands-on work is doing its job on the structural side. When pain keeps returning anyway, it may mean something else is re-triggering it before the tissue can finish healing.
What Causes Chronic Pain?
Chronic pain – defined as “ongoing pain that lasts for more than three to six months, persisting past the normal healing time…” – is complex and often the result of a perfect storm your body has been quietly building over time. Old, unaddressed injuries, diet, movement patterns, sleep quality, environmental exposures, stress levels, hormonal shifts and even nutrient deficiencies can all feed into it. It’s usually the accumulation of several small, ongoing stressors that eventually tip the body past its natural ability to cope and repair.
What the pain feels like can be a clue. Sharp, localised pain that’s worse with specific movements often points to a mechanical or structural issue, think a joint, disc or old injury site. Burning, tingling, shooting or “electric” pain usually suggests a nerve is involved. And widespread, achy, or multi-joint pain especially alongside fatigue, poor sleep or brain fog, often indicates an overworked nervous system or systemic (whole-body) inflammation, rather than a structural problem. This is why the same “tight achy shoulder” can respond beautifully to treatment in one person and barely budge in another: The underlying driver is different.
The Underlying Drivers
Some of the underlying drivers of chronic pain include:
An old injury that’s become a “weak point” and ongoing target for inflammatory activity. Manual therapy can manage this, but rarely resolves it fully until the underlying inflammation is addressed.
Low-grade inflammation from diet, usually from high intake of artificial or highly processed ingredients, which irritates the gut lining and effects the gut microbiome leading to systemic inflammation and generalised muscle or joint soreness.
The Sleep-Pain Cycle: Pain often disrupts sleep, and poor sleep lowers our pain threshold and increases inflammatory markers the next day, so it becomes self-reinforcing process.
Autoimmune conditions such as Rheumatoid Arthritis, Ankylosing spondylitis, Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis or Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, where an overactive immune system targets “self-tissues” throughout the body, causing local damage and pain.
Reproductive conditions such as Endometriosis or Fibroids which commonly occur with chronic hip, pelvic or lower back pain due to cysts or lesions with persistently elevated inflammatory markers like cytokines and prostaglandins.
Nervous system sensitisation: after pain has been present for a long time, the nervous system itself can become more reactive, amplifying pain signals even once the original injury has healed. This is a real, measurable phenomenon (not “in your head”) and is one of the most missed pieces of chronic pain.
Nutrient deficiencies: low vitamin D, magnesium, B12 or iron can all lower your pain threshold and slow tissue repair.
Chronic stress: can directly raise inflammatory markers and reduce your body’s ability to repair.
Chemical exposures (e.g. harsh cleaning products, mould, cigarette smoke) which can accumulate in the tissues, triggering inflammation and auto-immune activity that can lead to cellular damage.
The Naturopathic View on Supporting Chronic Pain
From a naturopathic perspective, most chronic pain that hasn’t responded to standard treatment is being driven, at least in part, by unchecked, low-grade inflammation. The body keeps trying to heal, but an ongoing driver (stress, minimal sleep, gut irritation, a hidden chemical exposure, a hormonal imbalance) keeps re-triggering the inflammatory response before repair can finish. This is why the pain lingers, despite manual therapy doing its job perfectly well on the structural side.
This is where naturopathic care comes in, not as a replacement for the excellent hands-on work happening at Restore Health, but as the missing piece that addresses why pain and inflammation struggle to resolve.
In practice, this looks like applying:
- Nutrition: identifying nutritional gaps, reducing inflammatory triggers in the diet, and increasing foods that actively support tissue repair and a healthy gut lining. Some nutritional supplements like PEA, Curcumin and High strength Omega-3s are also promising for pain relief and target inflammation.
- Herbal medicine: traditionally used to help modulate the inflammatory response, dampen pain pathways, stimulate tissue repair and calm the nervous system to support better sleep and cope with stressors.
- Lifestyle and nervous system support: tactics for sleep, stress regulation and gentle movement – all of which influence how “trigger happy” your inflammatory and pain systems are.
- Targeted testing, where appropriate, for certainty in complex cases.
The goal isn’t just to manage the pain. It’s to identify and calm the underlying drivers so the tissue can actually finish healing, and the cycle of damage-and-pain has a chance to break.
What to do if this sounds familiar…
If you’ve done “everything right” and the pain is still there, it might be time to look deeper into why.
Initial Naturopathy consultations here at Restore Health Clinic, cover your health history, current symptoms and any prior treatments or testing, and map out which underlying drivers might be playing a role for you. From there, I may recommend specific testing (such as inflammatory markers, nutrient levels or a gut assessment) and build a personalised plan combining nutrition, herbal medicine and lifestyle support, designed to work alongside the chiropractic and rehab care you’re already receiving here.
If you’re ready to explore what’s really underneath your pain, book an initial consultation below. I’d love to help you get to the bottom of it.
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
Jasmine – Clinical Naturopath, Restore Health Clinic