By Pat Anson, Editor

It sounds a little hard to believe. Can something as simple as changing your posture put you on a path towards pain relief?

“When I started talking about posture 40 years ago, you would have thought I shot the Pope. I was completely dismissed,” says founder Pete Egoscue, a 70-year old Vietnam veteran and blunt talking former Marine. “The key to an excited, engaged present life is the ability to maintain your energy, which requires the musculoskeletal system functioning at its optimal design posture. Period. Once you do that, the whole world changes for you.”

Egoscue, who is a fitness expert for Sonima, says the healthcare system is going broke because of a misguided focus on treating chronic pain with medication and surgery.

“They assume that the source of the pain and the cause of the pain are the same thing. So if you have a herniated disc, they think that’s the source of the problem. If you have a torn cartilage in your knee, they think that’s the problem. If you have migraine headaches, they look at your brain. It goes on and on and on. What’s dropped out of the diagnostic process is the ‘Why’ of things,” Egoscue told Pain News Network. 

Egoscue says most forms of chronic pain are not disease or age-based, but are self-induced – the body’s way of telling us that we’re physically off balance. And instead of asking, “What wrong with me?” – he says pain sufferers should be asking, “What is my body trying to tell me?”

In most cases, Egoscue says the body simply wants to be returned to its proper alignment. That was the case with Steven Shea, who is shown in the first installment of “Becoming Pain Free” that his body is misaligned – his shoulders slumped over and his chin tilted to one side.

“By the time you see the 8th episode, you will see a completely different guy. He’s totally changed. Did that have anything to do with Egoscue? Not really. It had to do with him. He’s the guy who was driven to find the knowledge base and the actual confirmation that what he was doing was in his best interest,” Egoscue says.

Once their posture starts to improve, Egoscue says clients are energized to do other things, such as exercising more and watching their nutrition. Avoiding sugar is a priority.

“The devil of all things that the body just cannot deal with is sugar. Sugar is a killer. It’s so clear, it’s patently obvious. It kills us,” Egoscue says.

Part two of the “Becoming Pain Free” video series can be seen by clicking here. A new episode will be shown each week on Sonima.com.