How to Fix Any Structural Pain in 2 Steps

No I’m not joking - let’s break it down

Everything I am going to write here is absolutely true for 99% of injuries and pain that I have seen in the almost a decade of being a specialist MSK physio. 

This is also the process that any physio, osteo, chiro or whoever it might be tries to follow, but struggles to execute. 

So here’s it is. 

Step 1 - identify what is causing the pain 

Step 2 - apply to treatment to correct what you found in step 1. 

That is it. Plain and simple. 

If you can understand exactly what is responsible for causing the symptom, they you can apply a treatment to fix that then you will change the system and the pain (or whatever the symptom is) will go. 

If it is this simple, why does physio not succeed 99% of the time? It is because of one simple mistake that I see time and time again. 

Therapists jumping straight to step 2 before completing step 1

This sounds ridiculous but it happens all of the time. 

People identify where the pain is (not where it is coming from) and dive head first into treatment. Or they jump to conclusions before examining the whole picture and miss a vital piece of information. 

How often have you heard this - Do this 1 exercise to fix you back pain!

Why does that not work? It completely skips step 1. It does not identify where the pain is coming from and fast forwards to the treatment. 

Now here is the secret nobody is going to tell you. The what that we are looking for in step 1 is different in absolutely everyone. There is no rule of thumb for what causes pain in each area of the body. We need to assess you to figure that out. 

So if you’ve had treatment for an injury and it hasn’t work, thing back and ask yourself, ‘where these 2 steps followed or did you start with step 2?’.