All first posts need a catchy title, eh?
At Marchese Sports Therapy, this is one of my favorite sayings when confronted by purely confounding descriptions of “why” a patient has what they have…well maybe I should rephrase that to read, what they believe is wrong with them as described by their (insert practitioner). Somewhere along the line it became alright to use inaccurate and often downright “wrong” information to explain what is going wrong with a patients body. Well, we are not about to perpetuate that, not in our clinical setting.
Example from earlier today…because this happens EVERYDAY! A patient was told by their (clinician)…you are probably wondering why I am not naming the type of clinician in this case? Because it is not important to disparage other professions, when there are excellent DC’s, PT’s, MD’s, DO’s, ATC’s, LMT’s, LiAcc’s, etc. everywhere. This is not a place to put down other healing professions, just inform, educate and hopefully restore the Human frame. Sorry, sidetracked. This patient was told the reason they had knee pain when performing a particular exercise (prescribed by the practitioner) was that they (the patient) were not stretching their IT band enough. Now this patient is a surgeon…very familiar with the real, and only way to “release fascia”…cut it. Her first instinct was to call the (practitioner) out, but being a non-confrontational type person she let it go and instead asked the question, “should I be trying to work through the pain in order to perform this exercise”, “is this exercise crucial to my recovery”? The (practitioner) answered, “it’s good pain”, and followed up with the ever popular “doctors make the worst patients”. In this case it is probably because the doctor is educated and the (practitioner) hates to try to pass off pseudo-explanatory BRO-vado bullpucky to anyone with an ounce of clinical knowledge for fear that his or her lazy, unsubstantiated “opinion” may be challenged.
So, in the above clinical case, what could the (practitioner) have said to the patient (MD) in order to sound relatively clinically competent?
Good question people, very good question.
With this blog, I hope to address a whole host of topics regarding clinical sciences, rehabilitation, strength and conditioning, and even the occasional case study from the “I Can’t Believe They Let You Leave the House” hall of fame vault. Some posts will be for professionals, and some will be more directed towards the lay person. Either way all the information will be useful to the Human being buried in each and every one of us.
Why the name Human Restoration Project? It’s a very long story, which will bore many and excite some…so I won’t take up time here to tell it. After all the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…or the one (just channeling my inner Mr. Spock on that one). Put briefly, the wonderful and positive trends in today’s healthcare and rehabilitative realms should be highlighted, and brought to the foreground of Human accessibility. Human Restoration is paramount, and should exist without bias…regardless of the practitioner, as long as the intervention is based in real science, and not opinion repeated over and over again until people actually believe it to be true. That’s what we are aiming for here. A resource for Human Restoration from pain, dysfunction, injury, deconditioning, and anything else included in my scope of practice…CYA!
Be well, until next time
Dr. John
Human Restoration Project 