Before a new client see’s me, I send them a consultation form where I ask them to fill out as much detail as possible about their current injury.
Some people write pages. Some people barely anything.
I’m essentially looking for clues.
Here is an example of a poor guy who contacted me who had over 15 years of various aches and pains – and who had seen a lot of Chiros’ Physio’s and Dr’s.
Symptoms: pain down the whole left side of body. Foot, Knee, IT band, hip, shoulder and neck.
He was literally trying ‘everything’ to resolve all these issues.
The issues started around 15 years ago (he’s only 32).
When he sent me his form – I already knew exactly what I wanted to assess in detail and where I wanted to start treatment.
And none of it had to do with his left side.
When he was young, he played a lot of rugby – he had a bad tackle which resulted in a huge impact to his RIGHT knee. Which then resulted in surgery.
A couple of years later, this same knee was causing pain (not much rehab followed the first Operation and he continued to play Rugby) – they then did surgery AGAIN.
Now to me, it doesn’t require rocket science to put 2 and 2 together. Why was everyone treating his left side symptoms? and not assessing and treating his right knee?
When we assessed the right knee, his body had come up with a whole host of ways to avoid load bearing into it. So clever to witness. But the stress this was causing to the other leg was crazy.
Treating symptoms is never ever going to solve things – in some cases they make things a lot lot worse (like for this poor guy).
Pain is a terrible indicator of where the problem is. Understanding our injury history is the one of the biggest keys in helping us finding solutions.