26/06/2025
WHAT WOULD THERAPY BE LIKE IN A PERFECT WORLD?
We all know that the world isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try our best to get as close to it as possible!
The problem for many of us is that our options are limited when it comes to pain relief…
In terms of public healthcare, our choices are meds, physio, TENS machine or nothing! Maybe surgery for the lucky or unlucky few depending on your point of view!
Then there’s paying for alternatives… massage therapy, acupuncture or bowen for example 😃 or there’s even chiropractors! 😩
There are other options too, so actually I’ve just contradicted myself, meaning that choice isn’t limited, it’s just very samey! Whatever route you go down, the therapy giver is following the same set of instructions as the next therapist who delivers that particular modality. This isn’t a problem when it works, but what if it doesn’t?
Everyone has their own thing that they swear by, but how do you know what’s really right for you?
The answer is you don’t! Well not without trying everything multiple times which is a costly business!
For some reason, masking the problem seems to be more popular than fixing it! Pain killers are the go to option for so many people in spite of the potential long-term side effects!
These people usually say I’ve tried everything! What they really mean is they’ve tried physiotherapy, a chiropractor, then eventually opted for popping pills with an occasional visit to their massage therapist.
I get it! I’ve been there myself, and it was the frustration of constant pain combined with throwing money at all the usual stuff that eventually led to me fixing it on my own. This is what kick started my bodywork career!
That doesn’t mean I’m the answer for everyone and every problem. There’s a long list of reasons why therapy works or doesn’t, however if my treatments are right for you then the expectation should be a full recovery, or at the very least, greatly improved!
I’ll break it down for you…
The majority of people in pain are coming for a back, shoulder, neck or hip treatment. Experience tells me that I can approach these therapies with 90% confidence that I’ll get results!
Then there’s all the other stuff such as knee pain. I can’t cover everything in one post so I’ll use the knee as an example. Lots of people suffer from pain south of the thighs simply because their body is imbalanced. Sometimes I’ll get a client who comes for back pain and when they report back to say their pain has gone, they’ll also say that they no longer have pain at the knees. This is the first of me hearing about it!
This happens regularly! Clients don’t always tell me about secondary problems because before seeing me, they’ve been told that it’s ’wear and tear’ by a GP who used their X-ray eyes to diagnose them.
🦵 👀
This is an irresponsible thing to do because some patients are now at risk of going through the rest of their lives believing this is true, when actually they have a curable condition! Yes, it could be arthritis or something else that manual therapy can’t help with, but let’s stop labelling people before finding out!
Whatever happened to simply saying “I don’t know”. Surely that has to be better than making stuff up! 🙄
Maintenance treatments make up the majority of what I do because prevention is better than cure, especially for those clients who don’t want to miss a day at the gym, or are desperate to attend the sporting event that they’ve been training so hard for. For some people it’s just an insurance against not going back to the chronic pain they used to live with each day.
So taking all of this into consideration let’s go back to the original question… what would therapy be like in a perfect world?
I’ve said I can get results 90% of the time for all of the common locations of pain, but less so for other areas of the body. Even though my success rate is much higher than most therapy stats, that still leaves more people than I would like without answers…
As I’ve said before, I love to travel and that usually involves meeting and receiving therapies from bodyworkers who tend to be doing their own thing. They’ve found their niche, which involves a fusion of really cool stuff. I don’t mean looking cool, even though it sometimes does! I mean getting results that conventional therapists can only dream about!
All of these international therapists have little golden nuggets of information that they’ve learned over the years, but none of them can claim to have helped every single person who has walked through their door.
I’ve met and received treatments from idiosyncratic therapists in Europe, Africa and Asia who all have a unique approach to healing and getting unrivalled results!
Now just imagine for a moment we could pluck each one of those bodyworkers out of their own country, including Scotland 😉 and place them all in the same wellness centre… we now have team of experts in a one stop shop that now covers every client type and every therapy requirement!
Let’s go a step further, now imagine that we could replicate this in every town and city, not only in wellness centres but in hospitals paid for by the tax payer. This means people in pain are getting fast results plus significantly reducing the need for expensive pharmaceuticals!
Okay, I’m getting a bit overexcited and it all sounds a bit unrealistic… or is it?
We all know that governments waste money in all sorts of ways, including war machines, because we live in this imperfect world. If we can somehow change our ways so that the focus can be on creating environments for healing and healthcare instead of destruction then that would be a start!
The biggest problem for us all is that that world ‘leaders’ tend to be narcissists and are only interested in their own living legacy, aka infamy! We just need to turn on the TV to see that!
To me, leaders of democratic nations shouldn’t be chosen on popularity and a bu****it manifesto, but instead a proven track record as a humanitarian because these days I don’t really see much of a difference between democracy and dictatorship!
I don’t have all the answers because I’m just a boy from Kirkcaldy who fixes backs for a living. This means I need my clients to put trust in me, but as far as I can see, trust is exactly what these authoritarians are lacking!
This isn’t a political page so I’ll quickly move on, but the point is we actually have all the knowledge and ability we need right now on this earth to heal the majority of people in pain, with some obvious exceptions.
This is what I believe anyway, and the strange thing is, you’re not going to find that information in any university textbook! That info is stored in the heads of multiple bodyworkers who are scattered across the globe and all have tacit knowledge of healing.
This isn’t how we do things though, is it?
Instead of actually helping people in pain, we now have GP’s who hand out a fibromyalgia diagnosis like sweeties to everyone and their granny!
🍬 🍬 🍬
I won’t elaborate on this too much because it’s likely to be another post in the pipeline, but I will say this… I can’t fix fibromyalgia but I have helped lots of people with a fibro diagnosis fully recover. There’s a difference, and that’s just one of many examples!
If I lived everyday in pain from increased tension, as the majority of people in pain do, I would likely have chronic fatigue, headaches and ultimately stress which contributes to insomnia, IBS and other symptoms!
That’s probably enough said about that for now, but why am I sharing all of this?
Well for no other reason than to get it out of my head and put it somewhere else. Like the majority of my posts, it’s a good way for me to take all the stuff that’s rattling around in my brain and share with others who might be interested or can relate to my frustrations!
I don’t really have a conclusion for this post, apart from saying I hope that future generations eventually work it all out and find a better way of doing things. Until then, most people’s idea of pain relief will continue to come out of a plastic jar 💊
