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I just returned from a 4-day seminar for advanced upper and lower extremity diagnosis and treatment. The people who put this on were the same people who have essentially put so many pieces together for my evaluation and treatment of injuries.

I went to the seminar thinking I would hear much of the same that I heard last time. My intent was to fine tune my treatment to obtain even faster results. What I got was much more. In the year that I had been honing my treatment skills, these researchers continued to forge ahead with more theories and biomechanical observations. I was trully inspired! They were not happy to sit back on their successes but instead were determined to understand everything about how the body moves and becomes injured.

This in turn inspires me to continue my observations and to discover solutions to problems others may not have been able to solve.

This week our nanny is away and I've been home more with the kids. My son just started pre-school so it's been me and my girl in the mornings. I have enjoyed this special time so much! She usually wants Mommy so this is a chance for us to connect. Wonderful!

Most back, neck, hip or shoulder pain I treat is resolved with correction of biomechanical problems. However there is a small percentage of people who need some soft tissue work- usually in the form of trigger point release- to get them over the final hump.
Usually this is the case for shoulder and neck pain clients. I think this is so because the shoulder is essentially a floating system which relies on muscle tone to hold it in place rather than joint compression due to gravity. Therefore it is more susceptible to stress due to errors in movement or usage.

Many of my patients have diagnoses such as bulging disks, herniated disks, spinal stenosis, spondlyolisthesis which supposedly are causing their pain. But after 2 or 3 treatment sessions most people feel significantly better. So either these problems are corrected or they haven't actually been the culprits for back pain. I wonder which it is?

A bad habit is any repeated pattern that leads to an injury or prevents recovery from an injury. I've often wondered, “Why do people develop bad habits?” until I began noticing it happening to me. Recently I began standing on and locking my left leg. This can cause my pelvis to rotate or create one side higher than the other. There really is no physical reason for me to do this other than to give my left leg a rest. But the consequences are not worth the rest and I have to remain vigilant in correcting this persistent bad habit.

Some other bad habits I've been running into lately are clients who are overtraining. Instead of taking a rest day after an 18-mile run, they'll bike up Vail pass. In their mind, because it's not running it is like an "active" rest. When I call them on this behavior, they'll typically shrug it off as their Type-A drive. I know many people who are Type-A but still do not overtrain. Often there is something deeper at work here that needs to be addressed before the overtraining leads to more injuries.


A new client of mine with a decades-long history of back pain and painkillers swears that I'm helping them. "Did you take any painkillers today?" I'll ask?
"Yes, of course" is their response.
"Then I don't believe I'm helping you" I replied.
My goal for this client is to be off painkillers. I know I can make that happen from a corrective standpoint but there are other factors involved-the biggest being their need (for whatever reason) to continue taking the painkillers.

Do these three stories have a common thread? Perhaps. My guess is that ultimately we need to look deeply at our reasons for doing things whether it is the development of an innocent weight shift, overtraining or taking medications when, perhaps they are not needed. Easier said than done but if it's going to happen, attention needs to be focussed on the behaviors to understand them.

Rick