In pain physiology, simple and relatable metaphors can powerfully reshape how people think about their bodies. Nugget #67 – We Grow Like Trees reminds us that human bodies, like trees, adapt, change, and heal over time. This message from Explain Pain Supercharged highlights resilience and the remarkable adaptability built into our biology – a core concept in understanding and teaching pain. Quick, simple, and reassuring, this nugget helps learners and clinicians alike appreciate that age-related changes seen on scans are normal. These “kisses of time” reflect life’s story, not necessarily injury or pain, and can transform how patients interpret their own body’s signals.
Nugget #67. We grow like trees
Attributed to Peter Roberts, Adelaide, 2011
Image from The Explain Pain Handbook: Protectometer Noigroup Publications 2015The common findings on scans and x-rays are usually related to age changes – the kisses of time. Left and right differences are quite normal. We grow like trees, never the same left and right, adapting to the seasons and the weather. Like trees, we too can be resilient against the irrepressible forces of nature, heal ourselves and can seek appropriate nourishment. Your body and any scans reflect your life story – not necessarily injury or pain. Google an image of Serena William’s (or any professional tennis player’s) dominant arm and you will see how different their two arms are.
Patients are naturally concerned about left/right differences in scan findings (or perhaps from what they’ve been told about their leg lengths by some practitioners). We grow like trees can help reconceptualise a person’s body image using positive, changeable imagery. Scan findings might need a deeper discussion, but this nugget can help break the ice.
– Noigroup
Neuroscience Nuggets are short pieces of biological information based on a statement or metaphor that can be used as educational analgesia, explicit education or part of overall storytelling. We have collected over 100 of these as part of a pain storytelling taxonomy. Find the full taxonomy in Explain Pain Supercharged (Moseley and Butler, 2017).
Thanks for posting this Tim. “We grow like trees” is one of my favourite and most useful similes and I must thank Peter Roberts for it.
Conceptual mapping theorists could have a field day with it. It’s a reasonably novel simile and these are mapped a bit differently to familiar similes so that’s a bit of unique brain ‘exercise’. But it has this aesthetic beauty, familiarity, comfort and memorability about it. It allows an instant aesthetic evaluation (most people love a tree), the tree-person link is rapid – (you may not mind being compared to a majestic oak tree), the, the essential concepts are easily laid out (ie we all age, adapt, you don’t see the underpinnings) and then the many inferences (eg so its ok to be different side to side ) are allowed.
David
I love this notion; it reminded me of some other research I stumbled upon recently about how trees communicate and support each other in times of stress. This was a powerful lesson about the importance of community in order to foster resilience, no matter the species: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/
thanks,
Miriam Parker, MSW, LCSW Scappoose, Oregon USA
Thanks Miriam,
I am going to add the communication and support bit to the story.
David