What is it about health and wellbeing problems that make us feel like we have to figure it out ourselves?
I’m not talking about learning how to care for your body or using the tools at your disposal to stay healthy and fit, those are good skills to develop. What makes us feel like we have to be able to diagnose our own problem correctly, create a plan to address it, execute the plan, and adjust accordingly when the unexpected happens?
This thought has been bouncing around in my head recently because I feel like I’ve been hearing a version of this every day:
“I told my partner that he should come see you for his knee but he’s trying to figure it out himself. He’s been complaining about it for a month! He’s seen his doctor but they didn’t really give him a solution that wasn’t an injection or surgery.”
Or
“I’ve been dealing with this pain in my elbow for a couple of months but I have a high pain tolerance so I’ve been able to deal with it. But it sucks! I can’t even lift a plate without pain.”
Every time I hear this I think to myself, why doesn’t this person think they deserve to ask for help? I am a natural “fixer,” –sometimes to a fault– and my fixer brain spins when I see a problem that I could fix, but haven’t been given permission to do so.
However, when I turn the question inwards, I realize that I’ve been guilty of the same thing! When a problem with my body arises that I don’t have the tools to fix, I often have to spend time convincing myself that I need to get help. These are the arguments I have to contend against:
If I try to get help from someone and they don’t take my questions seriously, don’t seem to care, make me feel silly for asking for help, or offer ineffective solutions, then this will be an epic waste of time and money.
If I try to get help and the solutions they offer aren’t aligned with my values, then I’ll either feel bad for refusing, or feel uneasy about accepting their treatment plan.
If all I get is an answer that I could have googled, I’ll feel frustrated that I couldn’t just find the answer myself
If you’ve ever had this conversation with yourself, I get it. Those feelings are totally valid. But here’s what I tell myself to convince me to go see someone anyways:
Solving a health problem rarely happens in one appointment. Often it’s more of a journey of collecting info, testing hypotheses, and incremental changes with gradual results. Because of that, it helps to go to someone you like and trust.
Most health problems are more easily fixed before they become big problems or before they become problems at all. Don’t wait until you can’t sleep to get help.
“Wait and see” can help you initially feel better, but it’s not a strategy for conquering the thing that caused the problem in the first place. You should probably have a plan for that.
If I found someone that understood me that I could trust with my health problems, that would be extremely valuable to me
Disrupting The "Norm": Performance Physical Therapy
At Alterra, we’ve used these experiences to inform our process and mission of bridging the gap between rehab and performance to help active people align their healthcare goals with their human goals. This is how we’ve re-imagined the process of solving a healthcare problem through performance physical therapy:
You have been using your upcoming wedding as motivation to exercise more, and you set a goal to increase your deadlift PR. One day during training, you hurt your low back. It started off as mild pain but has started to get worse, and it’s starting to make it difficult to lift weights at the gym, and you’ve had to stop going for runs with your fiancé. It’s now been two weeks since it started, and you decide that it’s time to get some help. You reach out to a physical therapist, and the first thing they do is listen to your story and try to understand who you are, where you’re at, and where you would like to be. After chatting on the phone, they lay out a 3 step process for solving your pain problem AND hitting your deadlift PR goal AND running 5 miles with your fiancé. This process involves no medications, no expensive imaging, and you can get started within the week.
On your first day, your therapist does a thorough evaluation, and comes up with a problems list that you will work on together. You do NOT feel judged for asking for help, you feel heard and understood, and you walk away from that appointment with your questions answered, a plan to start working towards a happier and healthier you, and a trusted partner to cheer you on and guide you towards success.
The two thoughts I want to leave you with are these:
What would you do with all of the time that you would save by letting someone help you “figure it out?”
How would your life change if that problem that you were having wasn’t there anymore?
At Alterra, we won’t judge you for wanting to figure it out yourself because we’ve been there. But we also won’t judge you for asking for help. If you're in Boston's Back Bay and dealing with an injury, let’s figure it out together!
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