Over the past five years I have written numerous articles and created over fifty videos as resources for my clients and the general public to help give them a context for how their bodies work.  Until recently I have kept those videos in the members section of this site and held off promoting anything about WhyThingsHurt.com because I wanted to focus on quality content.

In the past year I haven’t posted much new content to this site because I have been working hard to organize and expand the information into a book to help my followers learn things in a more appropriate order.  I have used client and personal stories to tie together relevant information about how your body and mind function and ultimately to explain Why Things Hurt.

My new book will be titled:

I am writing this article tonight because I am mad, I am offended and I  want to help create change and I know that I am not alone.  I have been a physiotherapist in British Columbia for twelve years, a path that required me to attain two university degrees and pass a written and practical certification exam.  I have taken over twenty five post-graduate courses, run a private clinic and work closely with countless other healthcare professionals and was just recently required to write a three hour exam to prove my ‘competency’ as part of our college’s Quality Assurance Program.

Physiotherapy is a regulated profession in British Columbia, meaning that we have a regulatory body called the College of Physical Therapists of BC (CPTBC) that creates standards and provides licenses for therapists to work as certified health care professionals in the province.  Apparently in 2007 the BC government passed a law called the Health Professions Amendment Act that requires regulatory bodies to monitor our ‘continuing competency’ defined as: the ongoing ability of a practitioner to integrate and apply the knowledge, skills, judgments and interpersonal attributes required to practice safely and ethically in a designated role and setting. 

Imagine walking down the sidewalk on a nice summer day, enjoying the scenery and the sunshine all around you.  Now imagine taking a visual picture of what you see in front of you and copying it.  Take that copy and paste it diagonally up and to the right so that it overlaps half of the nice beautiful scene you are looking at.  Now take that second copy and strip all the detail out of it and cover it with a thin layer of milky water.  While you are at it, put a big smudge on anything that ends up in the centre of the picture and add distortion to anything that might be a straight line.  I have this milky, distorted, hologram version of the world superimposed over my proper vision now and it sucks.  And that’s not even the worst part, when I walk or drive I get the sense that the shitty hologram world is moving at me faster than the clear real world.  For example, every morning when I walk from my parking spot to my office there are a series of tree shadows across the sidewalk and a set of two manholes that I walk over.  As I approach the shadows and the manholes, I see double of everything, but as I get closer and closer to the real objects, the amount of the displacement of the second blurry pictures gets less and less to the point that they almost become one object as I pass over them.  The fact that my double vision gets worse the further an object is away creates the illusion that the world on the right of me is coming at me twice as fast as the world on the left of me even though they are actually distorted pictures of the same thing. 

Sports become a part of who you are, both mentally and physically.  For children, sports become a means of socialization, but they also play a prominent factor in the development of movement.  For adults, sports become a means of fitness, stress relief, competition and commonly injury.  No matter where you find yourself on the spectrum of young to old, or novice to professional, sports have likely impacted your body in some way.  Appreciating how and to what extent may help you address chronic problems, prevent future ones and likely maximize your performance.

Each sport comes with its own particular set of movement patterns required of its’ athletes.  Dancers have chest up, shoulders down, butt clenched, toes out drilled into them.  Tennis players and golfers spend hours twisting one way and not the other.  Bikers ride hundreds of kilometers with their bodies tucked into a tight aerodynamic position with their head poking up, and runners get used to just going straight forward all the time.  How much these movement experiences will affect you really depends on what stage of your life you do them, how much you do them, and if you also have a variety of other sports you do, or have chosen to specialize and commit to the performance of just one.

Early movement experiences will really mold a child’s posture and coordination later in life, which is why I encourage physical play with my kids.  Activities like chase, wrestling, rolling, jumping, throwing and catching really help kids build an awareness of how to use their bodies.  They get some bumps and bruises along the way, but it helps them learn that pain is temporary and that their bodies are really amazing at healing themselves if they give them a chance.  As a physiotherapist, I can quickly tell the difference between adults that have a physical, athletic history and ones that have lead a fairly sedentary lifestyle, both in their body awareness and their outlook on their current pain or dysfunction.  Past athletes tend to have a more optimistic and in-control attitude about their rehabilitation because they have relationships with their bodies due to past experience.  Conversely, adults that haven’t competed in sports in their youth tend to be much less assertive in their healing and much more dependent on health professionals because they are less in tune with their bodies.