Sometimes the Right Question Reveals the Answer

A patient asked me a question recently that caught me completely off guard.

We had been talking about the most recent blog I wrote, and he was telling me how much he enjoys reading them. He said there are times when something I write feels strangely personal, almost like I am writing directly to him. That meant a lot to me because writing these blogs has become one of my favorite parts of what I do. I get to take things I see in the office, things I notice about the body, pain, adaptation, movement, the books I read, and life, and try to put them into words that make sense outside of a treatment room.

I told him that maybe the reason some of these ideas feel personal is because, underneath everything else that makes us different, we all live inside a human body. We experience different lives, different injuries, different stress, different losses, different victories, but the anatomy underneath it all gives us a strange kind of common ground. We all compensate. We all adapt. We all protect ourselves. We all change.

"Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else."

-Margaret Mead

Then he asked me a question I wasn't expecting. Which passion came first? Was it the writing, or was it the hands-on anatomy work? I had to think about it for a second, and the answer surprised me.

It was the writing.

I grew up in an environment that wasn't very diverse. In many of my classes, I remember being the only Hispanic kid in the room. My name was always different from most of the names around me. Edgar wasn't a common name among the kids I grew up with.

Then somewhere along the way, my curiosity led me to search for someone else who shared my name. I wanted to find a well-known person named Edgar.

Edgar Allan Poe.

He was probably the most famous Edgar I had ever heard of at the time, and for whatever reason, that mattered to me as a kid. Maybe it was simply seeing my name attached to someone important. Maybe it was his writing I later appreciated. Maybe it was the imagination and emotion behind his work. Whatever it was, I connected with it instantly.

I started writing poetry. I started enjoying literature. Long before I knew anything about anatomy, neurology, manual therapy, or the work I would eventually spend my life doing, I enjoyed trying to take something difficult to explain and put it into words.

Looking back, I don't think that part of me ever went away because there was another lesson from high school that has stayed with me forever. One of my literature teachers told us that one of the most important things we could learn in school wasn't necessarily a fact, a formula, or something we would eventually be tested on. It was learning

“how we personally learn best.”

I then realized that I needed to interact physically with something to really understand it. Even reading was physical for me. I liked having the book in my hands. I liked turning the pages, marking things, going backward, finding something again. I learned through contact. Eventually, that same way of learning carried me toward anatomy and hands-on work.

Suddenly I wasn't just reading about the body. I could feel it. I could move a joint, test a muscle, feel differences between sides, follow tension, compare what I expected to find with what was actually underneath my hands. Anatomy stopped being something printed on a page and became something alive.

That curiosity eventually became much of what I now explore through the Human Adaptation Model. And strangely enough, all these years later, the writing and the hands-on work have found their way back together.

Most of what I write about begins with something I notice in another human body. A pattern. A contradiction. A patient who doesn't respond the way a textbook says they should. A muscle that tests differently after another area is treated. A person whose pain makes more sense once you understand what their body has been adapting to.

Then I start asking questions. That may actually be the bigger lesson this patient helped me recognize. Sometimes the most important thing isn't immediately finding the right answer. Sometimes it's learning to ask a better question.

We naturally ask,

"Why does this hurt?"

It's a reasonable question, but it can also lead us toward the assumption that the painful area must be the problem. What happens if we change the question? What have I been doing more of lately? What have I stopped doing? What changed before this started? What movement am I avoiding? What part of my body has been carrying more responsibility? What was my body originally trying to protect me from?

Those questions can lead us somewhere completely different.

I often say that pain is evidence of change.

That doesn't mean every change is bad, and it certainly doesn't mean pain should be ignored. It means something within the system is different than it was before. The demand changed. The tolerance changed. The tissue changed. The movement strategy changed. The nervous system changed its perception of what feels safe.

The body is constantly answering the circumstances we give it.

Sometimes an adaptation that helped us through physical or emotional stress during one chapter of life stays around longer than we need it. And sometimes we don't recognize any of it until someone asks the question that makes us look backward.

That's what happened to me.

A patient asked what came first, the writing or the hands-on work, and suddenly a line appeared connecting pieces of my life that I had never really thought to connect before. The kid who loved literature. The young man who discovered that he learned through his hands. The massage therapist fascinated by anatomy. The clinician who couldn't stop asking why one side of the body behaved differently from the other. The person sitting down after work trying to turn those observations into something another person might understand.

Apparently, those weren't separate interests after all. They were different expressions of the same curiosity.

Maybe that's why I continue writing. My hands allow me to ask questions of the body. Writing gives me another way to explore the answers. And every once in a while, someone asks me a question that reminds me to turn that same curiosity back toward myself.