What’s Wrong With Me? Diagnosis Vs. Assessment Findings

We get it. Everyone wants a #hashtag. A diagnosis. Something to tell their friends. We can’t always give you that. You may have “plantar fasciitis”, or “rotator cuff tendonitis”, etc etc etc. The million dollar question is WHY.

Why is your posterior chain overworking and what is it compensating for? Why is part of your shoulder working above its paygrade?  What is underworking on the flip side?

Motor dysfunction (from an orthopedic sense) doesn’t really come out of nowhere. Some traumatic acute injuries do, but the ones that sneak up on you when you picked up a towel, or walked your 20 lb dog who pulled a little, aren’t those. Those are the straws that broke the camel’s back.  That is from nervous system and compensation exhaustion.  

Dysfunction and compensation sit in our nervous system. We get injured, our nervous system phones it in to keep our eyes level and keep us feeling safe. It’s useful for a bit, kind of like swelling. But if the dysfunction doesn’t get assessed and treated, it settles in and you end up training it, reinforcing it, and then it hurts.  We hear all the time: “but that happened a lifetime ago”.  Yep.  The longer it sits in your nervous system, the more disruptive it becomes.  

Blanket diagnoses don’t tell us what’s wrong, they just tell us what’s yelling. Techniques like #neurokinetictherapy let us, as therapists, unwind the dysfunction and access what was inhibited to change function. Not everyone’s plantar fasciitis is the same, so it should never be treated as such. Beware the “quick catch all” fixes, stretches, etc.  You are a special snowflake, and your dysfunction, even if it can be labelled with the same “diagnosis”, isn’t the same.  There is no one size fits all. 

Gait, alignment, movement breakdown, joint mobility, muscle testing, etc should all be a part of a diligent assessment.  How your nervous system holds you up against gravity from the foot up and the nervous system out, are clues to treating & preventing injury and optimizing biomechanics.  As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  A biomechanical tune-up before things go haywire can ensure that you have access to your inner unit (the stuff that needs to fire before everything else), as well as the big movers.  

So when someone asks us “so what’s wrong…”, the answer is a list of biomechanical and nervous system compensations, not a blanket diagnosis to put on the fridge.  If you want to optimize your biomechanics for your sport, your profession, longevity, injury prevention, etc, we’re here to help. This doesn’t have to be a long term relationship, as techniques like Neurokinetictherapy, Anatomy in Motion, SFMA, PTDR etc, give us efficient solutions.  #getassessed