I have been facing with many patients recently who had a similar experience after visiting a therapist and they have told them “Your Back Is Out of Alignment” “A patient once gravely informed me, as if sharing a dangerous secret, that therapist had predicted his back pain by identifying a minor leg length difference ten years earlier.
The prediction was a warning: get your short leg fixed, or else you’ll be laid low by low back pain for sure!” Really?
There are (at least) five major problems with these kinds of diagnoses:
1- Not only are structural explanations for pain generally unsupported by any scientific evidence, the last 25 years of research results mostly undermine them, often impressively.
2- Professionals can rarely agree on them (poor diagnostic reliability).
3- Most structural diagnoses are difficult or impossible to do anything about even if you can agree on them in the first place.
4- Patients are often given the alarming idea that the slightest crookedness is “serious” (and may require expensive therapy to correct).
5- Finally, biomechanics is obscuring more useful, new ways of looking at how pain works.
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To understand injuries and pain problems and to recover from them more effectively, both patients and professionals need to stop trying to think of the body as a machine that breaks down and start thinking more in terms of squishy, messy physiology, especially neurology and biochemistry. Pain itself is more complex (Read more: Acute pain vs Chronic Pain) and useful to understand in comparison to mechanical glitches supposedly cause it.
I have added couple of exercises and tips for you to try at home, check the video below and you can start these routine right away. Meantime if you have any question feel free to leave a comment.
Dublin Sports Injury Clinic is a Physical Therapy Clinic based in Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin2. We have a high volume of patients who are treated with low back pain. Initially, our treatment will be focusing on helping our patients to get pain free as quickly as possible. We educate our patients to understand the cause of their back pain and how they can stay pain-free. Rehabilitation exercises will be customized for every patient and we show them the correct techniques and progression.
Watch This: Perfect posture does not exist
By: Dr. Greg Lehman, BKin, MSc, DC, MScPT, explores when biomechanics and posture are important and when they’re not.