Does your body just consist of different independent body parts? “My feet hurt. My back hurts. I have a bum shoulder…”. We are so used to talking about our body parts individually and in isolation. We are forgetting that our body is one interconnected system that is specifically designed to have different parts of our body working together, not separately.
CAUSE AND EFFECT, WHICH IS IT?
When our feet hurt, we go to the foot specialist. Or we thought knee surgery is a must when our knee hurts. We often fail to ask one very important question before making decisions like this: Do my feet hurt because of my feet? Or is my knee pain resulting from just injury in my knee? Without looking at our body holistically and fully understanding the inter-relationship between different parts of our body first, specialists often end up treating the symptoms and not the root cause of our pain. Yet, we wonder why our pain keeps coming back. To alleviate the pain, we often subject ourselves to repeated surgeries or a lifetime of painkillers. Just to add insult to the injury, the biggest excuse I’ve heard being given to why this is happening to us is: This is the inevitable signs of aging. Really? Is this really just it?
While age might have something to do with it, it is not what most think. The main reason age is involved is not just due to natural deterioration, but due to prolonged periods of misusing our body and continuing using our body in a misaligned way without knowing it.
IT’S NOT MY FOOT?
What do I mean by that? Let me give you an example. After twisting my ankle during one of my backpacking trips way back when, my feet started to hurt badly. I decided to visit a foot doctor. I was so sure it was my foot that was injured. After a careful examination, the foot specialist came back and told me my foot is totally fine. I asked him, “how come my foot is in pain?”. He suggests that I go see a chiropractor.
I went and saw a chiropractor. He worked on me for a while and told me I have a weak back. The chiropractor warned me not to carry heavy stuff. I said, what? “I live alone, who’s going to help me then?” OK. At that time, he didn’t quite draw a clear connection between my feet and my back for me. But, since it got a little bit better, I moved on.
SPINAL INJURY
A few months later, my back started to hurt, so this time I went to see my primary doctor. She ordered an MRI. The doctor discovered I have L5 – S1 disc protrusion. She suggests physical therapy. So, there I went. I did the physical therapy for a while; the condition seems to improve. The feedback from the physical therapist was: this is probably something I am going to have to live with for the rest of my life, just be careful.
Fast forward, I must admit, I probably wasn’t too careful. Life got in the way. I ended up owning a BBQ restaurant with my husband. Since I was full-time managing the store, when in need, I must do what I have to do even though I am not supposed to lift something heavier than I should. When I felt some discomfort, I would faithfully do the physical therapy exercises. Then, something bad happened. I woke up one day in excruciating pain AND I could not straighten my back!
EMERGENCY ROOM WOES
I went to the emergency room. I wanted them to fix me. But apparently that’s not what they do in the emergency room. In my case, all they wanted was to give me narcotics to reduce my pain enough so they could release me. In the end, they gave me a set of crutches and sent me home.
To get to the bottom of my problem, I went to a spinal specialist. I figured he would be the one that can resolve my problem once and for all. Well, instead, the doctor recited to me the whole encyclopedia of how our spine works (what a great student!), but still no solution. He said–without confidence–maybe surgery will help. Not very comforting. With no help from western medicine, luckily, I found a very competent eastern doctor that saved me. For more detail of what he did read the blog Our Relationship with Pain.
JAW, KNEES, SHOULDERS
After I got relief from my back, my jaw started to hurt. Then later my knees hurt once in a while. Finally, I even got frozen shoulder. I was a mess! Throughout the years, I blamed it on aging. Although by this time, I have become very resourceful in resolving my issues without needing to resort to bottles of painkillers or narcotics. However, it took me a long time to finally put it together that ALL MY PROBLEMS ARE RELATED!
Even though I found great competent Eastern doctors to solve different parts of my problems through acupuncture and adjustments, my problem ultimately manifested itself somewhere else BECAUSE I never addressed the root cause of the issue!
THE ROOT CAUSE
What was the root cause of the problem? While the eastern doctors DID “fix” me, I unwittingly continued to use my body in a misaligned way (i.e. How I sit, how I walk, how I slouch into a couch.) Different parts of my body continued to have to compensate and do the job they are not designed to do! Without learning how to carry my body the way it’s designed, just like driving a badly aligned car, sooner or later I knock myself so far out of alignment that some part of my body complains!
I wish I had discovered this earlier. I wish all the doctors would start looking at their patient holistically and investigate deeper into cause and effect rather than just focusing on different parts of the body as if they are independent, separate, and not related. That would have ended so much needless suffering!
I must give a special shout out and thanks to Pete Egoscue for his incredible book “Pain Free”. While I got an inkling of inter-relatedness through experiencing Eastern medical techniques, this is the first book I discovered that really connected the dots and made it so clear to me! It is further proof that we must take charge of our own health and wellness. Live well, be healthy and be happy!
Feature photo: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay