“Haters gonna hate.”

I have found myself on a swinging pendulum of hate lately…that sounds really weird and terrible. Let me clarify. There is a spectrum between 2 things: hating on everything because it is not legitimate and accepting anything and everything because “it works for me.” In the rehab/ fitness world everyone falls somewhere on this spectrum. Some could care less whether something has been properly studied, it is sexy therefore they endorse it. The other side is a group of people who are air-tight clinical scientists that will not only shy away from treatments/philosophies/techniques that are not determined effective by research but will aggressively oppose them. One is a lazy and probably a bad clinician, the other needs to have a hobby and is probably tough to get along with..which is massively important in physical therapy (see all therapeutic alliance research). I have found myself closer to the grumpy guy who needs a hobby for the majority of my schooling and now into my career. I like science and I want to do the best job I can as a physical therapist, which has led me to read research and try to base what I do in the clinic on that research. However, I am starting to realize that being grumpy about what other people are doing in the clinic is silly…I am swinging on the pendulum of haterness. I have found myself embracing/being ok with some of the other philosophies that different from me lately, even if I don’t agree with what they are saying. For example, I don’t love when my current patients come to me telling me they had a mysterious essential oil massage over the weekend and they feel the best they have in weeks (I have been treating them for weeks…). I don’t like that. It’s confusing. It doesn’t make sense that someone with a raging disc herniation that is irritating a nerve root causing radicular leg pain would get better by rubbing lavender-mint oils on their back and “IT bands”. But it happens. People get better with weird stuff sometimes and I am starting to just come to peace with that truth. I am not going to try to tell the patient that there is no way lavender fixed their spinal nerve roots…I am going to go “Great! I’m so glad you are feeling better,” and move on with treating them.

I am ok with things that shouldn’t make sense working. I am going to chalk most of it up to placebo, for now. The real problem that I (and other PTs) face is this: how am I going to decide when a treatment is legit or not? That is the biggest challenge with all of this. Is lavender-mint oil a viable treatment selection for my patient? If so, how do I come to that conclusion?

While I have been moving slightly towards the other end of the spectrum as far as my attitudes towards other interventions, I still have a responsibility to treat my patients with the highest level of care I can, which means using treatments that are known to work. My gameplan is to learn the heck out of a very well researched and documented system (my choice is the McKenzie Method for a few reasons) and then layer in stuff that is less well understood as people don’t respond. There are people who will get better with lavender-mint but I’m going to try to bring them through a number of “tried and true ” interventions, get them strong and encourage the heck out of them before I move on to some more uncertain things.

This makes me look ultra un-sexy in the grand scheme of the rehab/fitness world, but I’m ok with that..haters going to hate.