One of the major problems in modern healthcare is language.

Patients don’t understand that most diagnoses are purely hypothetical. It’s a guess. It’s giving a name to what the doctor may think is the cause or the symptoms.

In fact, many doctors don’t even realize it’s a hypothesis. To make it worse, they sometimes they give the wrong diagnosis, false positives, or non-correlated findings.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to diagnostics that involve hard biological data (the flu, cancers, diabetes, infections, fractures, etc.).

What I’m talking about are the diagnoses that can only be proven in hindsight after treatment.

The story goes like this….

Dan has back pain. It isn’t getting better. In fact it’s getting worse.

He goes to urgent care. They tell him it’s a herniated disc and give him steroids.

It doesn’t get any better with this treatment.

He tries a chiropractor who tells him L5 is rotated on top of S1. The manipulation makes him worse.

He goes to an orthopedic doctor. The ortho doctor tells him he has spondylitis. Orders an injection. He mentions he might need a fusion when he’s older.

Dan gets the injection. It helps a little. But his pain is still debilitating.

Then he tries the local big box Physical Therapy company. The therapist tells him his pelvis is out of alignment. One is higher than the other. And that he has piriformis syndrome. They try some exercises. He’s more sore for the next 3 days.

One of his friends tells him to try acupuncture.

He finds this helpful and reduces his pain some. But he still can’t function in his day to day. He can’t pick up his kids or sit down for prolonged periods.

He tries a personal trainer. This guy tells him his back is weak. He has him perform deadlifts.

Dan can’t walk for 3 days after this.

So as of now, Dan has:

A herniated disc
A rotated vertebrae
Spondylitis
A rotated pelvis
Piriformis Syndrome
Stagnant chi
A weak back

So whether Dan realizes it or not, the summation of his medical care has only told him he’s extremely broken and nothing works.

This further makes his pain and dysfunction worse.

This hypothetical story happens so often that there are studies supporting the phenomenon that the more doctors you go to, the worse you get.

The Solution

Realize that no one knows truly what is causing your problem until it’s been fixed.

Diagnosis is almost always determined in hindsight after you have solved the problem.

They call this type of mindset a treatment-based classification system.

The best thing about it is that it focuses on the patient and WHAT WORKS. It doesn’t focus on diagnoses or theory. It focuses on results.

So take the diagnosis and theories with a grain of salt and just focus on what makes you better.

If you’re struggling figuring out what that is, give us a call.