When Medicine Doesn’t Understand

Anyone who’s read my book knows I advocate using a strategic approach: devise a plan for how to get back to health. It at least made me feel like recovering was possible and at the time, that was good enough. Eventually I discovered it was the key to getting well again. It was obvious early on that medical science did not have many answers to my pain. My doctors were the experts in medicine, I thought, but I was the expert in me.

Repetitive strain injuries seem to express uniquely in each individual and that's the stumbling block on the medical side. The Los Angeles Repetitive Strain Injury Support Group wound up being a boon. Healthcare practitioners came to our monthly meetings to talk about what they thought was the cause and the best corresponding treatment. I weighed what they had to say against what I was experiencing in my own body. Speakers often included handouts of their research and I’d passed those handouts to my practitioners and asked what they thought. Some agreed, some did not; some were inspired with ideas of their own. The results got incorporated into my treatment and then we tested it out. 

I stumbled on Dr. Oliver Sacks’ book Migraine during this time and it captured my imagination immediately. He described our neurological system as dimensional like quantum physics. It cycles. I had noticed that my pain, sleeplessness, functionality, and mood were all cyclical too. So I started tracking those cycles, looking for a good time where I might stretch my limits and break up the chronic muscle tension that underlies repetitive strain. 

The Body Quantum by Fred Alan Wolf delves much deeper into these same ideas. In quantum physics, the observer is key. Wolf goes into great detail of what this observation means for our musculature. Simplified, he says healing chronic muscle tension involves learning to consciously control the balance between the length of the muscle and the tension of the muscle.

I could not do that on my own. But my physical therapist, acupuncturist and yoga instructor could. And when I observed how their work made my muscles feel, my muscles seemed to learn how to change that balance on their own. These collaborations taught me how to live with my RSI and, I like to think, it taught my practitioners some things too.

@JillGambaro is the author of The Truth About Carpal Tunnel Syndrome . She advocates for patient engagement and employee engagement to resolve carpal tunnel syndrome and keep everyone working healthy. Follow her on LinkedIn, Blogger, Facebook and Twitter.