It’s funny how I treat problems of the body but don’t think about the grand scheme of movement. Recently I stepped back and thought about many of the knee pain cases I’ve been treating and realized one common factor in all of them. Although the knee flexes and extends, it is rotation of the knee joint that causes most of the problems I see. The morphology of the end of the femur dictates that  rotation must occur at the knee joint when it bends and straightens. But where are the muscles that control the rotation?

The quadriceps, hamstrings and calf muscles control the bending and straightening of the knee and may assist in controlling rotation but they are not primarily rotation muscles. The pelvic muscles control rotation at the knee because they control the femur.

From the other end, foot pronation and supination affect rotation at the knee as well. But I rarely find that treating issues here translates directly to alleviating knee pain. 90-100% of the time it is working with the hip musculature, which controls femoral rotation, that fixes knee pain.

I spoke with a woman over the phone in N. Carolina who has terrible back pain. I diagnosed her problem and she agreed with me. I then sent her several exercises to correct her pain. These were the same exercises that have worked for countless clients I’ve seen with similar problems. Unfortunately she isn’t experiencing pain relief from them.

When she emailed me she said that perhaps she has gone too long letting things go and so wouldn’t respond to the exercises. I completely disagree. Our bodies respond incredibly fast to the removal of harmful habits and initiating corrective exercises. I’ve seen people with back pain for 20 years have their pain significantly reduced in just one session–all from retraining the body to move and work as it should.

So, why didn’t this woman feel relief from her pain doing the same exercises everyone else has used to completely eliminate their pain? I think it has to do with her belief in herself. All too often, I see people who don’t believe they can be helped. There is something transferred from me to a client that instills belief that they can get better. People who don’t see me face to face aren’t able to absorb whatever that is.

Part of how I do this is that I test a client to see what hurts and when. For instance if it hurts to bend over, then we note at what point in the range it hurts and how much. Then I ask them to do a corrective exercise for a few repetitions. Afterward I ask them to re-test (bending over in this case) to see whether the pain is resolved. Almost always it is. That is when belief is kindled in their mind and they allow themselves to think their pain will stop. I think instilling belief in the client is a powerful aspect of healing.

Here is my problem though. I am writing a series of books to help people fix their chronic pain. I know the techniques work but will they work if I’m not there to help convince the reader they will work. If I’m not there, will belief in the probability they will be pain free take root in their minds? I don’t know. Somehow I want these books to engender this belief just as I do in clients I see face-to-face. How can I achieve this?

I had an interesting client the other day who has had inner ankle pain for 2+ years. This alone is unusual as I have only seen outer ankle pain before.  She has been treated by chiropractors, accupuncturists, cold laser treatment, massage therapists etc with no change. Finally she went to see an orthopedic doctor who, in spite of finding no evidence for a fracture, placed screws in her ankle. Still the pain persisted.

This was an unusual case to be sure only because nothing made any difference to her ankle–better or worse. I began with her hip evaluation and found several problems there as well with the lower leg. Correcting these, however, made no immediate difference in her ankle pain.

Finally I began testing the influence of her arch on her pain. Still no change. I then mobilized her ankle bone forward and backward. This almost always elicits a positive response for pain relief. No change. Then I tried something I’d never done before and mobilized her inner ankle bone upward or cephalad. Her pain disappeared.

But how could she keep the ankle bone up like this? I decided to try taping it, essentially cradling the ankle bone while pulling it up and completing the tape by partially spiraling it around her shin. This relieved most of the pain, which wasn’t good enough. I wanted her to be completely pain free when she left my office. So I took a third strip of tape and, holding the bone in the corrected position, taped it in a cephalad direction. She was completely pain free after the third piece.

This is very unusual because taping the inner ankle is taping the tibia–a weightbearing bone. To think the the tape would hold a position against the tremendous force of the body weight is something interesting. I tape feet successfully all the time but that is correcting a pronation force directed rotationally so the tape has a better chance to hold the correction. This is much different.

She is doing much better now. I believe the hip issues I discovered set her up for this alignment issue and she will need to correct those to remove the stress to the ankle bone. But for the time being, she is snowboarding and hiking without pain. The first time in more than two years.

To me this is an amazing example of just how little a change needs to occur in order to correct pain. I don’t believe I actually even moved the tibial mortise but instead just unweighted it a little.

My son is turning four years old tomorrow. It’s a strange way to mark time, having kids. Tonight was the last time I hugged my three-year-old boy. I’m so proud of him!

I have been writing a book detailing some very powerful self-treatment techniques I use to treat patients with chronic pain. It’s been an interesting venture because, in the process of writing the book, I now understand how my subconscious or intuition has been working to guide my treatments. This understanding, in turn, has helped guide my treatments.

Each chapter of the book addressed a different area of the body. For instance neck pain & headaches, shoulder pain, elbow pain, back pain, hip pain, knee pain, foot & ankle pain and back pain & sciatica during pregnancy. The feedback I’ve received is that the information was too technical for laypeople (who happen to be my audience). In the process of breaking the information down even more, each chapter has expanded to become its own book.

The title of the series will be Fixing You. The first book out will be Fixing You: Back Pain and will be followed by seven other books all to be published this year. It will be a busy year for me! My sincerest hope is that these books help the thousands of people out there living with chronic pain. So often with just a little attention to the right areas, pain will vanish. I hope the Fixing You series can guide people to pain-free lives.

I’ve recently stumbled on, what I believe, to be a successful treatment for the elimination of tennis elbow or golfer’s elbow. I was working with a golfer with a history of severe elbow pain. It was so bad that 2 years prior, he had one of his forearm muscles severed by a surgeon to reduce his pain. This worked to some extent but he could still not swing a club or exercise with weights.

Typically my treatment involved painful digging into the forearm muscles to release deep trigger points and gain temporary relief. But the pain from tennis elbow always returned. I would’ve done the same with my golfer but the surgeon severed the very muscle I usually targeted! Obviously the pain was coming from somewhere else.

I was working with his shoulder, fixing problems there when I noticed a subtle change in his club head angle. After evaluating his forearm I found his forearm rotators were not working correctly. I developed a treatment for them which I thought should remedy the issues I encountered and he was completely pain-free within one minute. His pain returned slightly next week so I treated him again and the pain was gone for good.

I’ve since tested this treatment out on a few others with similar results. I’m writing a series of books and one is about elbow pain, in which I will include this new simple treatment. I’m very excited and hope others have similar results.