If you’re suffering from back pain, and you’re a successful engineer, read on because success is a transferable trait and the #1 thing that can help you out of pain. For the most part all you need is good info and some movement guidance.

First, what types of therapy have you tried that helped and what didn’t? Whatever helped, the mechanisms can be useful, whatever didn’t its mechanisms will probably not be very helpful.

 Don’t Go The Cheapest Route, Interview Practitioners. You’ll Feel Who Can Truly Help You.

Let’s take physical therapy as an example (nothing against PT, effectiveness is not about a profession but the practitioner). My clients tend to have their share of PT stories because they initially go down the insurance route and that’s often their first sort of disappointment. (You want to reduce the number of failures/disappointments you have, but for a lot of people it seems like without those failures they wouldn’t believe or tried so hard to implement what I brought). 

Let Previous Results Guide You

So, your PT showed you some exercises and sent you home with the exercises on a piece of paper . . . that’s a step in the right direction. What were some reasons things failed and why were results only temporary?

• Lack of human connection
• They didn’t help you understand “What” got you there in the first place (if there was no injury)
• They didn’t help you understand the “Why” behind the exercises
• They didn’t help you understand the “How” they work
• They didn’t help you understand “What” you were trying to achieve 
• They didn’t help you understand your unique path of rehab 
• They didn’t deconstruct old ideas of pain and new ones based on science.
• They didn’t help you understand the brain body connection. 

You were just told to “Do the exercises” and often you’d go week after week and get the same exercises and it just didn’t really make sense. 

I guess the assumption is that even though pain is a complex thing, you’re supposed to get better from simple exercises, even though the evidence for that is scanty.

Is Your Practitioner Human?

Here’s the problem (not only with PT but with most therapies),

the practitioner focused so much on the exercises themselves, that they forgot about the person in front of them. The thing we should really be focusing on is . . . 

 What the person needs to know and to do to get better. The protocol that worked for the person before you probably won’t work for you.

If I said to someone learning to drive, “Just step on the gas pedal and you’ll get there.” I’d be correct, but not really.

There’s a lot more to driving than stepping on a pedal. But yeah, I get it, you can do all the other things but if you don’t step on the pedal you won’t get to your destination.

The Best Therapists Act As Teacher-Guides

Therapists should stop acting like robots and become more like teacher-guides. When therapists are teacher-guides then you can own your body with sovereignty, connect, and implement. If you’ve already been successful in one aspect of your life, it is very likely you can be successful again, this time in regards to pain (something that directly affects your life and well-being) by implementing change and transformation in your own body.

In my experience if you’re an implementer you already have an Awesome Pass because you can come in ready to do, and not passively wait for a miracle to happen, or to be fixed. A therapist should be able to teach you to be better connected with your body. They should give you tools that heal and help change your condition.

In my 26 years of helping people out of pain what I’ve learned is that the most valuable quality in a client is prior success – implementers implement, and implementation creates transformation. 

So, if you’re in pain and you’re an implementer, let’s go!