MAGIC PILLS?
IF MAGIC PILLS REALLY WORKED, WE'D ALL TAKE THEM
Somehow, we live in a culture that rewards sickness. We will save health care for a different blog entry, but preventative medicine is quite interesting to me. The human body is resilient and will do whatever we tell it to — it will bend, turn, twist any which way. So, unless there has been trauma, many times our injuries are directly related to our behavior or our inactivity.
Pretend you see a doctor for nagging knee pain. The doctor checks it out, sends you to get an X-Ray or MRI, and sees no major damage — just normal wear and tear of an adult knee. So, he prescribes you an "anti-inflammatory" drug like Celebrex® to help with the pain. He tells you to take one pill per day until your prescription is out, and also to use your refills if you need them. No movement analysis. No muscle testing. No dietary questions. Just some fancy chemicals-in-pill-form that are supposed to help you "feel better." Oh, and no discussion about how these new chemicals will effect the rest of your body.
Pretend again that you see a fitness professional for knee pain. He asks about your daily activity, past injuries, current workout regime, nutrition and sleep patterns. He then puts you through a series of exercises to watch you move and sees a dominant anterior chain and a weak posterior chain. It's possible, he suggests, that the assessment showed overly developed quadricep strength with underdeveloped gluteal/hamstring strength. He says that by strengthening your hamstrings and glutes plus using self-myofascial release to break up your quads it's possible your knee pain will go away. No magic pills; just intelligent movement analysis.
I believe doctors are helpful people but in this situation they are putting a bandage on a bullet wound. Yes, they may have stopped the bleeding by helping with the pain but the fitness professional is the one that dug the bullet out by changing behavior. Lifestyle changes are always superior for greater overall health. Magic pills do not exist.