The Bigger Picture

This week I had a new client in for an initial consultation who had been struggling with back pain for many years, and more recently started struggling with neck pain too.

They’d been down the GP route, had an MRI which showed a disc bulge and degeneration within the spine, but all they were given was a sheet of exercises to follow and told that it's not too bad.

Frustratingly, this is something we see all too often. If someone told me I had degeneration in my spine, I'd want to find out why it happened and what could be done to either solve it, or prevent it from getting worse. Being given a sheet of exercises and getting told it's not too bad unfortunately solves nothing. If anything it makes it worse, as it minimises the issue and makes the person feel like the pain they’re experiencing isn't actually anything to stress about, so they just get on with life and don't seek further help. 

This is the sad reality of living in a pathogenic society. Preventative care is not readily available, and even care at the point of ‘mild’ issues is minimal. It's not until it’s severe enough to require surgery that it really gets taken seriously. 

We also see the other side of this too. All too often we have clients that have had previous surgeries, spinal fusions, discectomies, etc, and are still struggling with symptoms. This is because the scan only shows the changes at the level of the tissue, which doesn’t correlate to the symptoms you experience. (This is because the symptoms are generated in the brain, based on multiple factors, but that's a topic for another blog).

The point of this blog is that you are not your scan results. You are not your diagnosis. Just because you have X, Y or z on a scan, or you were given this diagnosis previously, does not mean that you have to spend the rest of your life with that hanging over your head.

The most important thing is how you’re functioning. A full functional assessment of your joints, muscles, and nervous system will tell you a lot more about your health than the results of a single scan will.