Frustrated with Pain? Learn from the Best Poker Players

Something that not a whole lot of people around here know, is my enjoyment from the game of poker. A couple of my friends from high school introduced it to me right before I went off to college, and I found a local game in Bloomington while I was at IU. I don’t play too often these days, but it’s still a rush from time to time. Not so much because of the gambling side of things, but because of the strategy involved.

The thing with poker, is that you can have a great rock-solid strategy, and you can play one hand perfectly, the wrong card comes at the end, and you lose a lot of money. On the other hand, you can make a bad move, be a huge underdog, and

Results sometimes take longer than you would like – in poker, and in health!

catch the right card and win even though it was unlikely.

Because of those swings, there’s something in poker called tilt.  This is where people let their frustrations from past hands make them play poorly the rest of the game.

I see a lot of similarities in people trying to make changes to back pain and reach health goals. Someone can have a rock-solid care plan, be on a great diet, and be putting in the right level of exercise, but results can be lacking. Because the patient feels frustrated that they’re still at the same level, they can often times start to over-extend themselves in their diet or overdo it in the gym. This usually leads to a yo-yo diet, or causing a new flare up from working too hard.

Instead of taking the tilt approach, the best poker players have learned to accept that the results are what they are, and they take action for the sake of the action itself. They know that if their strategy is done over the course of thousands and thousands of hands, in the long run they’re going to win.

If you ever feel frustrated in the results of chiropractic rehab, please talk to me. It could be that we have the right strategy, we just need time to let it play out.

- Dr. Scott Minton