There are a lot of different healthcare professionals here in the Fort Collins, Colorado area. Everyone seems to have a different approach, but everyone must be helping people otherwise they’d be out of business, right?
How it is that people SWEAR by certain things helping them through an injury but we may have no science to support it? It could be something completely different person to person.
“My plantar fasciitis went away almost immediately after starting to supplement with [INSERT SUPPLEMENT].”
“All I needed to do to get over my back pain was to start stretching regularly!”
“Doing exercises didn’t help at all… But when I started getting [INSERT MODALITY], my pain went away.”
“[INSERT PT] wasn’t helpful at all, but then I started seeing [INSERT PT] and they were able to get me better.”
Besides acknowledging that the placebo effect is a REAL THING, there’s something else at work here too…
A lot of pain and injuries tend to have a “natural course”, where the body heals, the pain desensitizes, or we just happen to do what feels right at any the right time and end up unknowingly rehabbing ourselves with graded exposure.
Effective interventions that are individualized to your needs will be able to alter the due course of the injury, allowing you to return quicker, But certain interventions may have MORE of an effect at a certain part of your injury’s due course.
Point being, a healthcare professional should be able to help sort through what interventions are the most evidenced-based and practical for your particular, individualized plan.
Just because something didn’t seem helpful at a specific time, and something else did, doesn’t mean it didn’t help at all. Sometimes individuals are looking for a particular form of progress that doesn’t occur until later on, which can make it easy to look past the certain effects of a specific approach.
For athletes specifically, we need to make sure that tissue capacity is preserved during times of protection and eventually built back up, and this is something that doesn’t just come back with time.
It’s important to understand that not all injuries follow a predictable natural course. It’s also important that sometimes people just need someone in their corner. Own your situation, find a good healthcare provider to individualize your approach, and trust the process!
