What if where you hurt is not the cause of the problem?
What if you get headaches because of a pinched nerve in your neck but the cause of that pinched nerve in your neck was a misalignment in your pelvis? The pelvis, then the neck, would have to be corrected before the headaches could go away. The neck and pelvis problems could also have begun years before the headaches showed up. The difference between where you have symptoms, as well as the compensations over time that mask the cause and the trail they’ve left, is what I am calling your injury pattern.
After over 20 years in practice, I’ve discovered that at least 50 per cent of the time things are not what they seem.
The shoulder that’s always sore isn’t purely a shoulder problem. That back pain, jaw imbalance, or hip and knee discomfort can be created by problems located elsewhere along the movement chain. They are not caused by the areas in which the distress is reported.
Instead, the discomfort is the result of an injury pattern, the product of your body’s intricate interrelationships and compensations over time. Your symptoms are often the last link in a long chain of events and subtle body changes. The cause itself may be buried deep in that pattern under layers of the body’s clever adaptation.
I have had my best results as a chiropractor by analyzing the whole person, looking for clues to that first link, the elusive cause, that when corrected gets the best results. Finding that underlying pattern of injury, primarily in the spine through which most forces are translated into movement, is absolutely necessary to create a new healthy and corrected pattern. Now that’s fun! Because lying at the starting point of that chain of events, buried in that pattern, is the underlying cause of that now symptomatic problem.
It’s our job as chiropractors to find that pattern, and to correct it to give you the health you deserve. Now let’s get to the cause!