Don’t focus on the colour of the walls in your house if you don’t have good foundations or you’ll be forever sorting out cracks rather than enjoying the delicate mocha.
All these messages are built from the science and understanding of what actually works to get people a long-term recovery in our clinic.
A boat is taking on water, you wouldn’t mistake bailing the water out with fixing the leak would you? The person who claims to have solved the problem with a bucket, whilst they may have avoided the ship from sinking in the short-term, haven’t fixed the leak. What they have done is bought time to find out why the ship is sinking so a long-term solution to the problem can be made.
This happens far too often with people and their pain, too many people are stuck with ‘bailing out strategies’ such as stretching, avoiding movements, being careful with movements. Living with a fear, even if at the back of their mind, that if they let their guard down and sometimes seemingly randomly their problem will surface again or flare up.
In the same way that getting the water out of the boat doesn’t mean the leak is fixed, getting the pain down doesn’t always mean the issue is addressed because why the problem happened is far more important than what is causing the pain.
No industry does this better than the aviation industry. If a plane crashes there is a roots and branch investigation to find out exactly what happened so they can learn from it and try to prevent it ever happening again. They even have a near indestructible box that records everything said by those in charge and all the readings from the plane so they can piece it all together. This is one of the reasons flying is such a safe way to travel.
This is where the the pieces of the jigsaw, what’s happened to someone leading up to the problem starting, and challenges they have faced is of crucial importance because what the body will always do is take the next logical step to try and keep you going.
If we hurt our knee we don’t think about how we are going to limp, our body does it subconsciously so we can keep moving. The same thing is going on constantly on a much smaller scale moment to moment, day to day, month to month.
When things happen out of the blue especially if you don’t feel like the action you did deserved it, so many people we see injure themselves getting out of a chair, car, bed, or even more frustrating the pain just starts to leak into their life. There are always a series of logical steps your body has taken. Often when you’re in pain and it keeps reoccurring I liken it to driving down a dead end road with nowhere to turn around. What I do is piece together how you got to where you are now and help you reverse out of this place and take a better route that leads you towards the things we are really helping with.
This is where you will start to see how the painful bit is really the bit that is overworking and can’t cope with the demands your body is placing on it. Usually about 80% of the long-term solution to the issue is in working out why your body isn’t able to use more of your body to spread the work out. It’s easy to diagnose a tennis elbow for instance but what’s harder is to work out why that individuals body has taken the logical steps to mean they are stuck with it and to then make a logical plan to resolve it.
The Key Takeaway:
Pain is your body sensing danger not telling you why it has happened. If you don’t work out why something happened then all you are doing is bailing out water from a sinking ship (or reducing the pain) rather than identifying the leak and making a plan to fix it so it can’t happen again.
