During my journey of looking for a solution to my injury, I began to classify doctors (PTs, MDs, etc) into one of two categories: those who looked at the area of injury and those who look at the whole body. I found that after visiting several (20+) medical professionals, that MDs looked only at the area of injury, PTs were more likely to look globally, and that as you get more holistic (chiropractor, acupuncturist, homeopath) they look most globally. Take orthopaedic surgeons for example--I saw several who, after examining my knee and found nothing "wrong," were flummoxed at my pain and inability to run. Shouldn't these Docs be able to offer more than surgery, meds, or nothing at all? PTs on the other hand were way more likely to check out how the neck, back, pelvis, and body in general was working or not working together. Still, I wondered how so many people could miss correctly diagnosing my relatively common injury of ITBS (see My History).
When my knee seemed to be classified as "fine" according to all the doctors I went to see, I started looking globally. I started searching the internet to find out how my diagnoses anteriorly rotated pelvis could be causing knee pain and how I could fix it on my own. Then I started looking at my posture and researching how possibly bad posture was effecting other parts of my body, contributing to knee pain. I thought I was on the right track, in fact I was really critical of medical professionals who weren't looking at the big picture and taking into account my/the body working together as a whole. I got so caught up in this that when my PT (who helped me be able to run again) said we should go back to the knee and investigate the source of the pain, I was really surprised. I had gotten so caught up in "in order to fix my knee, 5 other things had to be fixed first," that I was almost shocked when we went back to basics. The kicker was that my PT knew how to properly treat ITBS. None of this "jump on a strengthening regime right" away when he knew that would make my knee worse. One of the things I remember him staying, especially when I sighted different stretches I had done over the course of a decade, was, "you've tried those exercises and they haven't fixed things for you, right?" Right, I replied. "Then let's try something else."
All I'm saying here is that while the big picture is totally true, the body does work together and one thing does effect another, that sometimes solutions can be simpler than we make them. At least that was the case for me. I figured that if 20+ medical professionals couldn't figure out the problem, then it must be really complex. So I started looking for a solution that would take into account what I believed to be correct diagnoses along the way. And since I wasn't getting the same diagnosis from all these professionals, I was basically on my own to figure out my injury. I guess my last words on this are to the source of the pain--if I could go back in time, I should have spent more time investigating/researching the roles of ligaments in my knee, etc.
Also, I came across ITBS sites, but the symptoms and treatment didn't exactly fit my situation. For example, the foam roller did bubkiss for me. According to some, the foam roller is one of the main ways to get rid of ITBS. When I asked my PT about the foam roller, he said that my ITBS was so severe that using the foam roller would actually make my situation worse. See! Who knew that? I never found that information once on any site detailing ITBS. My PT did say that the Stanford xcountry team had far fewer incidents of ITBS if they started using the foam roller before and after their runs, reducing the occurrence of ITBS among runners dramatically. That's great for those who are proactive, but for those of us who already had ITBS we were hosed.
Read more...
