Symptoms
Most people's problem is they think pain is the problem. Pain is just a marker or a signal from your body to you that there is a problem that needs to be solved. Sometimes, urgently.
For example, my client had pain issues in the knee so we took photos to analyze. These photos were taken from the same level, height, and distance from the camera. The photo on the left will be labeled as before, and the photo on the right is after. The latter, however, is where there are obvious signs of progress. We can see that there is a pretty significant change in her postures such as the position of her pelvis and upper body.
Her left leg was experiencing an excessive sense of heaviness in terms of weight. The soft tissue of the muscles, tendons, and ligaments was receiving more force in pressure daily as her right leg was not able to support her body.
Her left leg was experiencing an excessive sense of heaviness in terms of weight. The soft tissue of the muscles, tendons, and ligaments was receiving more force in pressure daily as her right leg was not able to support her body.
The problem
If you were to stand on two different scales, one foot on one scale and the other foot on the other scale, which do you think would record with a higher weight? The chances are high that the left foot would register a higher weight because the body's center of gravity has shifted. The act of balancing requires steady maintenance of the center of gravity above the feet. A person would fall when his center of gravity is displaced beyond the position of the feet.
Again, most people think that pain is their problem when most of the time, pain is just the body's way of telling you that there is a problem. For the longest time, my client thought her right foot was giving the problem and launched an all-out effort to fix it. When I saw the photos through a series of tests I've designed for her, I realized that she was not distributing her weight over both legs the same way.
It tells that her right leg's tissues were undergoing excessive fatigue and had more tension and pressure than the left leg. When you excessively use one leg differently than the other, it would result in pain. In her case, it's not the right leg's fault, it's actually doing exactly what it has to do. The left leg, however, cannot function well because it cannot bear the same load of weight.
If it was not for the series of tests and analysis, the left leg's inability to function well would have flown over the radar. This is the major benefit of assessment. It takes you a step back and goes to the root cause of the pain so you can consider other possibilities instead of fixing it right away.
Damage vs healing
The problem my client had at the time this photo was taken was that her left side wasn't healing. The left leg was creating damage faster than her body can heal. Her rate in the speed of ceiling damage tissue was not nearly as fast as how quickly the tissues were damaged daily.
This is how healing of chronic and acute pain starts such as in my client's case. We stopped chasing what hurt and we started looking at what the body was not doing so this led us to find the path that would rebalance and restore muscular function which would then lead to better movement. And better movement means less wear and tear of the muscle tissues which will ultimately make us feel better.
The toolkit
The Pain Assessment Toolkit that you took asked you different questions because just like any issue, you have to assess every problem first before finding solutions to each one of them. It's not so much about fixing the knee pain, the toolkit helps me understand that it might not be the knee but the arch or foot problems that are causing the knee pain.
Imagine what's going to happen when she walks. Each leg now has a better capacity for carrying her full body weight which means the limp goes away. And she's now going to share the equal force attention which means one side isn't going to continue to be experiencing this excessive muscular fatigue and soft tissue breakdown. It's really how and where we place our attention that determines if we get the right results or not.
There is so much value in taking just a step back and analyzing by taking photos of what your bodies are doing at rest or in motion and consulting the right person who could help you with it. This is what I teach people, especially in my program, that everything is a process and we take things slow because problems cannot be fixed overnight.
Assessment is done every 30, 60, 90, and 180 days later. Over time we see how our functions, posture, and movement improve. We get insights into how our bodies have adapted and 'fixed' pain.