Have you seen the commercial where the priest and the iman are talking and then when they try to stand up both present with knee pain. They ponder the issue and then decide to buy each other knee braces. What does this say about our culture and the way that pain should be dealt with? Clearly Amazon believes that the answer to addressing knee pain is to wear a brace and clearly they think America is in line with this idea or they wouldn’t include it in their commercial. This idea of using a brace is so clearly a part of our culture that one of the biggest companies in the world decides you have it as a back drop for a nationally seen commercial.
But what is the reality when it comes to knee pain? What would wearing a brace due to identify and treat the pain? The brace and its use is part of the American mindset because the cause of knee pain is so rarely diagnosed and treated appropriately that people are left in pain and try to find ways to function while still experiencing the pain. Think about it. Pain is an indication of a tissue in distress. The reason the body elicits pain is to create conscious awareness of the distress of the tissue so an intervention can be performed to treat the tissue and end the distress thereby ending the need for the pain signal and pain simply ceases. What tissue is identified as a tissue in distress and what intervention is performed to resolve the distress of that tissue when a brace is provided? None! The brace acts as a short term mechanism to offset the pain being experienced. The problem is that the tissue in distress remains in distress and continues the body’s need to elicit pain. That is why wearing a brace never resolves pain.
So why did something like wearing a brace become such a part of our psyche that even Amazon would use it as a backdrop to one of their commercials? Simple, getting treatment for knee pain through the medical establishment does not properly identify or treat the cause of knee pain and therefore, the need for the pain signal to continue goes on and on. A person has no choice but to seek alternatives and after a long enough period of time of something that does nothing to address the cause of your pain like a brace becomes just another option. I understand why a brace becomes a common place remedy to most people; bad information. Just like scoliosis causes pain or arthritis or a herniated disc. None of these cause pain in almost all cases they are identified through diagnostic tests. They exist and progress slowly and persistently but in almost all cases never eliciting a pain signal. These types of structural variations are just like the wrinkles on your face. I am not aware of anybody suffering from wrinkle pain. But then again, there has been a culturally created, medically generated promotion that they do like scoliosis, arthritis or herniated discs. If these were the cause of pain and they were treated, then the body would no longer need to elicit pain and pain would cease. “Failed back surgery syndrome” is the diagnosis created by the medical establishment to account for people still having the same if not more pain after being treated by surgery for structural variations which people are told are the cause of their symptoms.
If you are still in pain after lots of medical practitioners have treated you and you have had lots of medical procedures like surgeries, or epidural nerve blocks, or joint replacements, or a host of others, don’t blame yourself. You are just part of the overall culture that has been conditioned to believe that getting treated and not seeing your pain resolved is just part of the way things are. Prescription pain medication addiction, radiofrequency ablation (buring nerves) and rhizotomies (severing nerves) are another part of the culture. Not that there is any reason that any of this should even exist but it does in abundance so that means it must be right. That’s what culture does. It takes what is experienced by many and simply assumes it must be right if so many experience it.
In the case of pain, that is completely wrong. You are being misdiagnosed from the get go by the false and completely invalid MRI. You are having the wrong tissue treated leading the tissue in distress to remain in distress keeping the body’s need to elicit pain continuing. There is no other reason for this massive failure of the system as measured by the fact that chronic pain now costs over 700 billion dollars a year, more than the cost of treating cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes combined. You need to look to the only alternative that is designed to interpret the body’s presentation of symptoms to properly identify the tissue eliciting the symptoms just as the body intended the system to work. That is the Yass method. It is the only method with a theoretical basis for why people have pain. It properly identifies the tissue eliciting the symptoms and in more than 95% of cases it is muscle. It resolves these types of causes by understanding which muscles are not functioning properly and utilizes targeted progressive resistance training to maximize strength allowing for full function without straining and ending the need for pain to be elicited.
The failure to resolve your pain is not simply a medical issue; it is a cultural one. The culture has to change and no longer accept failure in the ability to properly diagnose and treat the cause of pain. Braces should no longer be the focus of commercials by massive companies feeding into the narrative that failure is acceptable.
For more information about the Yass method go to www.mitchellyass.com or email me at drmitch@mitchellyass.com