The Symptom Is the Signal: Why Pain May Be Your Body’s Hidden Messenger
The most natural human response to pain is to get rid of it. It could be the persistent ache in your stomach, the heaviness of depression, or the tightness you carry in your chest… who wouldn’t want quick relief?
But what if we viewed pain a different way – a signal, instead of a symptom?
After 40 years of general practice, I’ve learned that pain itself carries information. It’s often the body’s way of drawing attention to something deeper, unresolved, or misaligned.
In this blog, I want to share why pain is a messenger that’s worth listening to – and how, through Transformational Acupuncture, we can begin to understand what it’s trying to say.
When the body speaks what the mind can’t
Not all pain begins in the body. Sometimes it begins in an experience that the mind has worked hard to bury.
I once treated a Fijian medical student who came in with shoulder pain. At first glance, it looked like a straightforward musculoskeletal problem. But as the acupuncture needles went in, he suddenly began to cry.
The pain in his shoulder wasn’t just physical. It was connected to a memory he had carried since childhood, when he injured himself helping his father. Along with the physical strain came a deep sense of guilt and grief that had never been expressed.
What surfaced in that treatment room was not a failed muscle or a worn joint, but an unresolved story. The shoulder pain was just a way for his body to hold it inside all this time.
Since then, I often tell patients and practitioners: the body will speak louder until it’s heard. If we only listen for physical causes, we miss the deeper truth. Pain is the body’s language for what the mind cannot put into words.
Why numbing the pain can numb the truth
Modern medicine has always focused on relieving symptoms as quickly as possible: Run the tests, prescribe a pill, perform a procedure. Once the lab results come back “normal” and symptoms begin to clear, the assumption is that nothing is wrong anymore.
Too often, patients who are still suffering might leave the doctor’s clinic with little more than reassurance or, in many cases, a prescription for painkillers or antidepressants. While these provide short-term relief, this is where the biomedical model shows its limits.
A painkiller can quiet the shoulder ache, but it cannot resolve the grief or misalignment that may be stored there. A sedative can soften anxiety, but it does not ask why the nervous system feels unsafe in the first place.
Besides, the numbers tell a worrying story.
Bridging modern medicine and ancient wisdom has shaped my own journey as a GP-turned-acupuncturist. If you’d like to explore this idea further, read The Healing Fusion: When Modern Medicine Meets Ancient Wisdom in a GP’s Practice.
More medication doesn’t mean more healing
In Australia, antidepressant use has skyrocketed. Back in 2000, only 4% of the population was on them. By 2009, it had doubled. By 2019, it was up by 12.5% (which amounts to more than 3 million people, including over 100,000 children).
Australia now ranks third highest in the OECD for antidepressant consumption.
And yet, outcomes haven’t matched the rise. Studies show that in young people, antidepressants are no more effective than placebo and may even carry greater risk. In older adults, the use of antidepressants for chronic pain has shown little proven benefit.
I’ve seen this in my own practice. One of my patients had been on antidepressants for 16 years. When she finally weaned off after acupuncture treatment, she was surprised to discover she could feel joy again.
For years, the medication had regulated her depression, but it also numbed her capacity to feel deeply at all.
This isn’t to say antidepressants don’t have their place. Medication can be life-saving for some. But when we rely on them alone, we risk silencing the symptom without addressing what it’s really pointing to.
How Transformational Acupuncture changes the narrative
If the goal in conventional medicine is to silence the symptoms, the goal in Transformational Acupuncture is to listen to them.
Every symptom is treated as a messenger that carries information. A headache might be pointing to unresolved tension. Insomnia may be the nervous system’s way of saying it doesn’t feel safe. Pain is no longer an obstacle to healing; it becomes a doorway to it.
In fact, I looked at feedback from 70 patients receiving Transformational Acupuncture, and the pattern was striking:
- 40% reported an emotional or spiritual release
- 37% reported relief of physical or mental discomfort
- 13% described deep relaxation or sleepiness
- 93% said the treatment had a positive effect overall
Most patients arrived wanting one thing: less pain. But they left the treatment table with more than that: a calmer nervous system, more clarity in their thoughts, and even moments of spiritual release for some.
This is what makes Transformational Acupuncture different. It gives us a way to listen to the patient as a whole person. It works alongside antidepressants where prescribed, enhancing the medication’s effect by supporting serotonin physiology.
The needles don’t just relieve tension. They open a space where the body can express what has been hidden, sometimes for years. And when that release happens, healing becomes more than pain relief. It becomes a reconnection with the self.
This connection between the physical and the spiritual is something I’ve written about before. You can read more in Science Meets Spirit: What Acupuncture Can Teach Us About The Nervous System And The Soul.
For practitioners: Listen beyond the symptom
If you’re a practitioner, you already know some patients come in with symptoms that don’t fit neatly into a diagnosis. Their scans are normal, their bloodwork looks fine, and yet their pain, anxiety, or fatigue persists. It can feel frustrating to watch them cycle through treatments without real change.
Start asking yourself:
- What emotion might be living inside this pain?
- What story has the body been carrying that the patient hasn’t found words for yet?
- If the symptom were a message, what might it be trying to say?
These are the questions at the heart of Transformational Acupuncture. They change the way we practice and the way we see patients – not as broken, but as people whose bodies are asking to be heard.
This is the work we dive into in my workshops.
In Level 1, you’ll learn the foundations of Transformational Acupuncture: the framework and techniques of how to recognize these patterns, interpret what symptoms are really saying, and integrate them safely into your practice.
In Level 2, we go deeper. We explore how trauma, blocked emotions, and spiritual misalignments show up in the body, and how to guide patients through breakthroughs that often surprise them as much as they surprise us.
If you’ve ever felt limited by symptom-based medicine, these trainings are designed to expand the way you see healing — and the way you can serve your patients.
A final word
At the heart of this work is a simple truth: pain is not the enemy. Pain shows us where grief has been buried, where trauma is still alive, where misalignment is asking for change.
And when the signal is ignored, the body doesn’t stop speaking. It speaks louder. What begins as tension becomes pain. What begins as anxiety becomes illness. The earlier we learn to listen, the deeper the healing can go.
For patients: the invitation is simple. Pause and ask yourself: “What might my pain be trying to tell me? What in my life feels out of alignment when this pain flares up? Is there grief, guilt, or fear I’ve been avoiding? Am I holding tension around an identity that no longer fits?”
For practitioners: the challenge is even greater – to step into a new way of medicine, one that looks beyond the symptom and embraces the whole story. That’s the calling of this work.
Every symptom is speaking, and the measure of our healing is not how quickly we can silence them, but how courageously we can listen.
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