Second... Third... Fourth... Opinions

The Six Blind Men and the Elephant is an old parable from India circa 500 BCE, where six blind men have never encountered an elephant before and touch on but one part of it. Each one has an entirely different experience of the elephant. It is a lesson in context. The same sort of thing happens in the physical therapy realms also.

Over your life you may seek out many practitioners in various disciplines, all of which may give you many different answers. Bodies are complex and often it's impossible to know what's causing your pain specifically. In practice, I give a lot of complex answers, likely unsatisfyingly so. People want simple answers. To have a clear cause. Something fixable or easy to blame.

While there are a lot of fads in body therapies, some of those scapegoats are impossible to know, irrelevant, implausible or taken out of context. Instead of finding things to fix or blame, I prefer to focus on the whole body, the nervous system, seeking out contributing factors and triggers, and focusing on what we can control and what we know that's evidence-based. Sometimes it's trial and error and a lot of unknowns, and while that may be harder to swallow, I'd take the messy truth over a lie any day.