I was doing Myofascial Release (MFR) work on a client today when in the course of the session, he made a pretty insightful statement. He said that ignorance leads to pain and suffering.
When I thought about it, I realized that this is definitely true. What brought this on is we were talking about medical care and how most doctors don’t understand anything about holistic treatments. Keep in mind that my client is a doctor who likes the holistic approach, and understands different types of treatment other than, yet along with ‘real’ medicine.
I find that with many lines of work, new discoveries are being made every day as well as increases in technology. As a former computer programmer, this is something I know all too well. The computer industry changes daily. If one stays in one job for a year, they find that technology has passed them by and they are no longer current in the industry. The same can be said for buying a computer as it is obsolete by the time you get it home from the store.
The same is true for healthcare. New things are found every day whether you look at the holistic side or not. Keeping up with them is hard if not impossible. But, doctors need to make an effort to try.
My father-in-law had been seeing a doctor when they lived in Ohio. He was dealing with a lot pain. This doctor gave him a drug that works, but is extremely addictive. As I understand it, you take a certain amount of this drug to relieve the pain. Your system then develops a tolerance to it. The next time you need to relieve the same amount of pain, you need to take more of the drug, more than you did the first time. Eventually, the amount of the drug you are using increases and increases. And there is no end to it.
Here is a case where the doctor either did not keep up with information on newer drugs, or just was too lazy to find out what the problem truly was.
I know of a person that suffers from some type of chronic (ongoing) pain disease. (There seem to be so many of these lately that it seems to be an unending battle to find drugs that work for them. But that is another part of the problem as doctors are only looking to drugs.) At any rate, the doctor she is seeing decided that the only way to stop her pain was to cut certain nerves in her back. This works for a while, and then the nerves grow back, and she is in pain again. So, every couple of years she has to have an operation to stay pain free.
Now, in the first place, cutting nerves seems like a very drastic thing to do. There aren’t any drugs that seem to work, so they go to surgery. The problem is that this sounds like a classical example of something MFR might help. There have been so many things that MFR has cured that were written off by doctors that it is something that should be tried before going to surgery. Of course, doctors don’t know MFR. They know surgery so they send their people there. I had initially offered to work on her (in fact, her mother who is a client of mine gave her two gift certificates), but considering how much damage has been done by the surgery, I have my doubts if it is too late for MFR to do her any good.
The problem is that when one has surgery, it leaves scar tissue which in turn leaves constricted fascia. So by having the surgeries, she has put a barrier of more problems that need to be dealt with before the one causing the ongoing pain can be worked on.
(As part of my last MFR classes, they showed a video made by a woman that had injured herself lifting a patient. She could hardly talk. She was in constant pain. She could not walk well at all, or for very long. She had been sent from specialist to specialist to try to figure out what her problem was. Eventually they determined that it was neurological and she had inherited it (this was the insurance company that covered her work environment saying this). Since this was not (or supposedly not) caused by what happened at work, the insurance company stopped paying for it. Finally, when all other resources had been used, she went to John Barnes for MFR. Within a couple weeks, she could walk, talk, and act like a normal human being. Her pain was gone, and she could lead a normal life again. The last part of the video showed her having fun at the beach. Seeing things like this makes me always suggest MFR before trying more drastic options.)
After this lady had gotten the gift certificates, she asked her doctor if massage would be good for her. He told her yes, but he needed to send her to someone who knew what to do so the bodywork would not make her condition worse. Jerk! Let’s not take into account that I might have a clue as how to make things better. Let’s just send her to your buddy so you can grease each other’s palms. Quack! The sad thing is that this person really truly believes that her doctor is the greatest in the world. Nice huh?
So, like my client said, ignorance of other drugs, other methods, other things out there causes pain and suffering in clients that might be made better with a little research.