Your Pain Is Rarely Where You Feel It
The knee is complaining, but the knee is almost never the problem. On reading the body the way a detective reads a room.
Rarely does pain in the knee originate at the knee. I know how strange that sounds when your knee is the thing that hurts. But after more than three decades with my hands on bodies, I can tell you: the place that complains is usually the place that has been compensating — not the place where the trouble started.
Think about your neck for a moment. Your head weighs about as much as a bowling ball. You would have neck pain too if you had to hold up a bowling ball all day — especially if the platform underneath it, your pelvis, your feet, your breathing, had quietly gone off balance years ago.
The muscles are only a compensation. They are not the cause.
The body is not a collection of parts. It is systems in constant conversation — bones, organs, fascia, fluid, nerves. An old principle in this work says that structure governs function, and function governs structure. Change one and you change the other. Which means a problem can begin in one system and, years later, announce itself somewhere else entirely.
Becoming a detective
So the work is detective work. The painful place is where the story ends, not where it begins. A knee that will not resolve sends me looking at the foot below it, the pelvis above it, sometimes an organ resting against the muscles that steer the hip. I follow the thread until the body shows me where it actually started.
If you have a pain that keeps coming back no matter how many times it gets rubbed, stretched, or adjusted — that is worth sitting with. The site of the pain has been asking for help. It may be time to ask what it has been compensating for.
— Leigh Ankrum