In my senior year of college, I did a study-abroad program in Germany.  At that point, I had already been as sedentary as one can be without going completely insane for three years. My doctors, chiropractors, and acupuncturists had all told me to rest, rest, and rest some more so that my wrist, elbow, and shoulder pain would go away.

Nobody really explained what good “rest” looked like, so I figured sitting on my butt, not playing sports, not running, not lifting weights, and just sitting in front of my laptop was a good way to rest. Occasionally, I’d try to play hockey or go for a job but it never went all that well. My shoulder would never take it so well, and I always felt short of breath.

So there I was in Bayreuth, Germany — resting. I started getting cabin fever, sitting in my dorm room as the frigid spring thawed into moderately warmer summer.  I decided to head out for a jog with a friend of mine, and I found that my left knee kept giving me this pinching sensation. I’d had knee discomfort in the past, and it tended to go away with exercise, so I figured once I got the blood flowing, the pinching would go away.

It didn’t.

Fifteen minutes of warmup jogging, and my knee was still pinching.

So I stopped.

I had also brought my roller hockey equipment with me to Germany (even with chronic pain, I never traveled without my hockey gear), hoping I’d find time and health enough to play.  I found that even when I skated gently on flat land, the knee pinched.

So I stopped.

And I discovered on a brief trip with friends to do some sightseeing in Hungary that my left knee pinched quite a bit.  I could not walk on flat land for more than ten minutes without pinching in my knee. Stairs made my knee so uncomfortable that I had to use my traveling companions as crutches to get down stairs.

I couldn’t very well stop walking altogether.

When I got back from that short trip to Hungary, I went straight to a doctor. He ordered MRI’s. After a nap in an MRI machine, I went home.

When I returned to the doctor’s office to discuss the findings, he examined my knee, looked at the MRI’s and gave me his firm diagnosis.

Keep in mind I’d been resting for 3 years already.

Keep in mind that it only took a few minutes of walking to set off the knee.

Keep in mind, again, that my chief activity for 3 years had been sitting on my butt.

Now, here is what the doctor told me:

“Your knee looks okay. You’re just using it too much. It’s repetitive strain. You just need to rest it.“

And that’s when I realized that the answers I was being given made no sense at all.  The MRI’s on my wall are the symbol of the last straw for me. They are proof that a high tech scan can tell you absolutely nothing about a knee with pain. They are a reminder that the current medical approach to chronic pain and injury make very little sense, and that even the best of technologies can’t help you solve a problem if you aren’t looking at it from the right angle.

In the end, my body did need more rest AND more movement. It needed constructive rest and constructive movement. My body needed to be retrained to work the right way. More rest at the computer was making my whole body worse. More rest and exercise that restored my posture has put me back on the ice three to five days a week with no problems for my left knee.

A fiery lady named Lorna came into my office a few weeks ago at the behest of one of my other clients to see what could be done about her shoulder.

After months of shoulder pain, weeks of PT and promises of surgery, I went to see Matt. After just one session with him I can tell I have found the road to recovery. Matt is very patient and encouraging. After a few more sessions I think I might even be able to challenge him to a hot game of hockey!!!

When Lorna walked in, she was unable to lift her left arm out to the side beyond about 30 to 35 degrees from her body. She physically couldn’t do it. It hurt. She also couldn’t lift her arm out in front of her beyond about 40-50 degrees without pain in the shoulder joint. An MRI by a  doctor showed an old rotator cuff injury which seemed too old to be “fixed” as well as signs of bone spurs within the shoulder joint.

So the doctor told her that if physical therapy didn’t help, she should consider surgery to clear out the bone spurs.  After several weeks of rotator cuff strengthening exercises and some painful attempts to restore ROM, she was no better off than when she had started.

But after one session at Upright Health, Lorna dramatically improved.

What ended up helping Lorna regain her range of motion in her first session with me? Restoring the proper alignment of the rest of Lorna’s body. She had a very strong asymmetry between the left and right sides of her back that was causing her whole torso to rotate. Her ribs were rotated, putting the shoulder blades into an odd position that did not allow for full range of motion.

With a few preliminary exercises to restore some balance to the back muscles, she regained some motion in her shoulder joint, and with a few other stretches, she was able to bring her hand up over her head to point at the sky. And all it took was just over an hour of postural work (versus more than 3 weeks of physical therapy).

So the lesson is that even if an image appears to tell you something, it might not. If medical images were fully, 100% conclusive, the doctor wouldn’t even have bothered telling Lorna to try physical therapy. If the bone spurs had really been the cause of her lack of range of motion, then no amount of rotator cuff strengthening would remove those bone spurs.

The trick was that the lack of range of motion was coming from the twisting in her back — NOT from the bone spurs, and all you needed was your low-tech eyeballs to see the problem!

“In a 1994 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a group of researchers imaged the spinal regions of ninety-eight people who had no back pain or back-related problems. The pictures were then sent to doctors who didn’t know that the patients weren’t in pain. The result was shocking: the doctors reported that two-thirds of these normal patients exhibited “serious problems” such as bulging, protruding, or herniated discs. In 38 percent of these patients, the MRI revealed multiple damaged discs. Nearly 90 percent of these patients exhibited some form of “disc degeneration.” These structural abnormalities are often used to justify surgery, and yet nobody would advocate surgery for people without pain. The study concluded that, in most cases, “the discovery by MRI of bulges or protrusions in people with low back pain may be coincidental.”

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, Page 162-163

There is also this brilliant gem in the same book:

“Forget about your MRI. What it’s showing you is probably not important.” ~Dr. Sean Mackey, Professor of at Stanford School of Medicine and associate director of the hospital’s pain-management division.

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, Page 163

It’s YOUR body, and you are privy to its signals and sensations every minute of every day!

Before you had doctors to do MRI’s and X-rays, what would you think if your knee had a pinching sensation after walking for a long period?  Would you assume that that sensation meant nothing?

You’d assume it meant something was pinching and that you’d have to figure out how to get things “unpinching.”

Nowadays, you have an endless number of experts telling you that your sensations don’t mean anything because there’s no obvious nerve or tendon damage in your MRI or X-rays.

But you still feel the pinching.

But you are supposed to assume it means nothing OR just stop using your leg altogether until rest (and the resulting weakness/atrophy) makes it get better.

Does that make sense to you?

It’s one thing for alternative health practitioners to proclaim that standard medical procedures are no good for your health, but it’s another thing to have medical doctors come right out and say it themselves.  A recent study has shown that medical imaging techniques like MRI and X-rays are totally unreliable for helping determine the cause of your aches and pains.  The New York Times has a great 3-page article on this that I’ll boil down to the bare essentials.

1. MRI’s and X-ray’s cannot tell you what’s causing your musculoskeletal pain, but many doctors either don’t realize it or won’t tell you that.

2. Doctors rely on assumptions about what is “normal” in your body and try to create that with surgery.

3. Those surgeries end up being — to everyone’s disappointment — unsuccessful.

Dr. Michael Modic — no slouch of a radiologist — works at the Neurological Institute at the Cleveland Clinic and is a recipient of the Gold Medal Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Scientific Development or Clinical Use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging.  Based on studies he’s done, “somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of people who climb into a scanner will have a herniated disk.”  That doesn’t mean they are in pain.  That means 20 to 25 percent of a random group of individuals, with or without any inkling of back pain will have signs that they have a herniated disk. That, according to Dr. Modic, means that a herniated disk on an x-ray or MRI cannot be reliably blamed for your pain.

Further, he says that as many as 60 percent of healthy adults with no back pain actually have signs that would make a radiologist believe they all have back pain.  So, even if you don’t have any back pain, a scan might make it look like you do!

The same issues hold true in other parts of the body as well.  Back in 2002, a study was published titled “Arthroscopic Knee Surgery No Better Than Placebo Surgery” that blew the whistle on the miracle cure to knee-pain — arthroscopic knee surgery.  That study showed that someone who had the full arthroscopic surgery to remove build-up, cartilage, etc. from the knee joint experienced the same reduction in pain as someone who had nothing but a small incision that made it look like a surgery had been performed!  The surgery was completely useless versus placebo, but it had been performed and marketed for years as an important breakthrough in treating knee problems. Doctors had been blaming all that floaty stuff in the knee for the pain, but taking it all out didn’t actually do anything to solve the problem.  Unfortunately, those expensive surgeries, according to one doctor, did hasten the need for total knee replacement surgeries for a lot of patients.

As Dr. Nelda Wray, a senior research scientist at the Methodist Institute for Technology in Houston puts it, “[doctors] see something in a scan, and [they] assume causation. But [they] have no idea of the prevalence of the abnormality in routine populations.” So she, Dr. Modic, and others like them are trying to get their colleagues to recognize that relying on images of bones to diagnose the causes of pain isn’t just bad medicine: it’s bad science.

Before you opt for surgery, consider that a nonmedical, soft-tissue therapy like Rolfing can actually change the way your body moves in ways that will address the roots of your musculoskeletal pain.  It’s non-invasive, natural, and certainly far less expensive than a $5000 surgery that’s no better than placebo!