Painkillers, Chemical Interference, and Healing: Are We Helping the Body—or Just Hiding the Pain?

By Dr. Masoud Shamaeizadeh, DC
Soft Touch Chiropractic
Porter Ranch, CA

Painkillers, Chemical Interference, and Healing: Are We Helping the Body—or Just Hiding the Pain?When we are injured, most of us want one thing immediately:
Make the pain go away.
But there is an important difference between reducing pain and actually healing.
At Soft Touch Chiropractic, we look at health through three broad types of interference: physical, emotional, and chemical. Physical interference can come from trauma, muscle spasm, joint restriction, poor posture, or injury. Emotional stress can influence muscle tension, sleep, pain perception, and other body functions.
But there is another area we should not overlook:
Chemical Interference Chemical interference may come from many sources, including environmental exposures and medications.
Painkillers deserve particular attention because they can reduce symptoms without necessarily correcting the condition responsible for those symptoms.
This raises an important question:
Could repeatedly altering pain, inflammation, or nervous-system signaling also influence the body's healing process?

Think About a Broken Bone Imagine breaking your arm.
An orthopedic doctor takes an X-ray, properly aligns the fracture when necessary, and places the arm in a cast.
But the cast doesn't grow the new bone.
Your body does.
The cast simply provides protection and stability so that the body's repair mechanisms can do their work.
Healing requires coordinated activity among cells, blood vessels, inflammatory mediators, the immune system, hormones, and the nervous system. Research on wound healing describes interactions among the immune, circulatory, nervous, endocrine, and other systems as important parts of tissue repair. (PubMed)
That gives us a simple principle:
Doctors can support healing. Treatments can create better conditions for healing. But ultimately, the body performs the repair.
The Nervous System Is Part of the Healing Network The nervous system does much more than allow us to feel pain.
It communicates throughout the body and participates in regulating movement, muscle activity, circulation, stress responses, inflammation, and immune activity.
Modern research increasingly recognizes the close relationship between the nervous and immune systems. A recent scientific review describes them as an integrated network with extensive two-way communication. (PubMed)
Research also shows that neuronal signaling can influence immune cells and tissue homeostasis. (PubMed)
Even within the musculoskeletal system, researchers describe nervous-immune interactions involving bone, joints, muscles, tendons, and nerves. (PubMed)
This is where the logic of healing becomes important.
If healing depends on coordinated biological communication, then we should be thoughtful about substances that chemically modify those systems—particularly when they are used repeatedly or for long periods.

Painkillers Change Physiology—They Don't Simply Turn Off Pain, Pain medication can be extremely useful and sometimes medically necessary.
But painkillers are not simply removing an unpleasant sensation. Different medications affect different biological pathways.
For example, NSAIDs such as ibuprofen interfere with prostaglandin production and inflammation.
Inflammation is not always the enemy.
Controlled inflammation is part of normal tissue repair.
That is why researchers have investigated whether suppressing inflammatory pathways could influence bone healing.
The evidence is not completely settled.
A 2024 systematic review involving more than 500,000 patients found no significant adjusted overall increase in delayed or failed bone union associated with NSAIDs, but researchers emphasized important limitations involving drug type and dosage. (PubMed)
A newer 2026 umbrella review found a higher nonunion risk associated with NSAID exposure in certain circumstances, particularly higher doses, longer exposure, adults, and traumatic long-bone fractures, while short-term use of 14 days or less was not associated with increased risk. (PubMed)
This illustrates something important:
Medication, dosage, duration, and the type of injury matter. It would be scientifically incorrect to claim that every painkiller prevents healing.
But it would also be overly simplistic to assume that because a medication decreases pain, it has no other effect on the biological processes occurring during recovery.

Opioids Raise an Even Bigger Concern Prescription opioids chemically alter pain processing through opioid receptors.
Their risks go beyond simply masking pain.
Research has examined interactions between opioids and the immune system, including effects on immune cells and inflammatory pathways. (PubMed)
A systematic review of long-term opioid treatment found indications of altered immune activity, although the researchers emphasized that the quality of available evidence remains weak and that much more research is necessary. (PubMed)
That limitation is important.
We still need better long-term human research examining how prolonged chemical modification of pain and nervous-system pathways affects the complete healing process.
But limited evidence does not mean we should stop asking the question.
It means we should distinguish what has been proven from what is a reasonable biological concern requiring further investigation.

Don't Confuse Silence With Healing Here is perhaps the simplest way to understand our philosophy.
Pain is similar to an alarm.
If you turn off an alarm, you have eliminated the sound.
You have not necessarily eliminated the problem that activated it.
Likewise:
Less pain does not automatically mean more healing. The broken bone may hurt less long before the bone is completely repaired.
A back injury may feel better before normal strength, mobility, and function have returned.
Pain relief can be valuable. But the ultimate goal should be to determine why the person hurts and what can appropriately support recovery.

The Logic of Healing Our philosophy at Soft Touch Chiropractic in Porter Ranch and Northridge is simple:
The body performs the healing.
The nervous, immune, circulatory, endocrine, and musculoskeletal systems work together during recovery.
Therefore, when possible, healthcare should not focus exclusively on chemically suppressing symptoms. It should also look for the underlying physical, mechanical, lifestyle, and other factors that may be interfering with normal function.
Chiropractic care does not manufacture new tissue any more than a cast manufactures new bone.

Instead, appropriate chiropractic care may help address joint restriction, movement dysfunction, muscle imbalance, and other musculoskeletal factors while the body's natural repair processes take place.
Don't just silence the alarm. Ask why the alarm is sounding—and support the body's ability to recover.Important: Pain medications can be medically necessary. Never stop or change a prescription medication without discussing it with the prescribing healthcare professional.
Research ResourcesFor readers who want to explore the science further:
National Library of Medicine — Nervous & Immune System Communication
National Library of Medicine — Neuro-Immune Crosstalk, Inflammation & Tissue Repair
National Library of Medicine — Neuroimmune Interactions in Musculoskeletal Conditions
National Library of Medicine — NSAIDs and Bone Healing Meta-Analysis
National Library of Medicine — 2026 NSAIDs & Bone Healing Umbrella Review
National Library of Medicine — Long-Term Opioids & Immune Function
Our goal at Soft Touch Chiropractic is Remove or reduce mechanical obstacles where possible. Restore better movement and function. Support the patient. Give the body appropriate time to heal.

Soft Touch Chiropractic
​Dr. Masoud Shamaeizadeh, D.C.
Porter Ranch / Northridge, California
Call: 818-831-0100