Why Diagnostic Imaging Isn’t Your Whole Story
Breaking news: Diagnostics are not the ‘be all and end all’!
Sometimes your health journey can feel challenging. You may have been making progress but then somewhere along the way you hit a wall, and you start to wonder if all your efforts have been in vain. Instead of being able to look back and see how far you’ve come, you tend to look so far ahead that your path to recovery suddenly seems intimidating and unattainable. What can make those feelings of doubt and disappointment worse is when you receive results from diagnostic imaging and now you have even more proof that your body is “falling apart”.
Though diagnostic imaging has an important role to play in modern healthcare, using it as the only lens through which to understand the complexities of your health may be misleading or over-simplistic. Many medical and scientific journals note that imaging is not foolproof due to things like errors in the reading of data, getting false positives, and when any deviation in the body is assumed to correlate with a negative or definitive diagnosis.
For example, in an article published in the National Library of Medicine, researchers looked at the lower-back health of 98 asymptomatic people, aged 20 to 80 years old. Within this test group, they found that “64% of these people without back pain had an intervertebral disc abnormality (i.e. bulge, protrusion and extrusion), and 38% had an abnormality at more than one level.” This demonstrates that although the imaging results warranted a high percentage of structural abnormality, the people with these abnormalities did not experience weakness, numbness, or pain because of it. Additionally, the article goes on to say that “athletically active young individuals, who were otherwise asymptomatic, had higher prevalence of disc degeneration and many other abnormalities in lumbar spine compared to normal individuals”. This again underscores how a singular piece of information like disc degeneration (observed from a high-tech machine) cannot define the complete outcome of a very complex system (your body).
When the nervous system gets ‘fired up’ during times of stress, the brain distributes a whole host of responses to various parts of the body. If we focus on capturing only one part of this equation, which may not even have relationship to the actual issue, we are not getting the whole story. It is therefore imperative that we seek to understand the interplay of physical, mental, and emotional factors in our health, integrating both objective data and subjective experience. This means acknowledging the lessening levels of pain you do feel, or the increase you’ve noticed in your mobility or movement, or the benefits you receive from new habits in your day-to-day life.
This may be the beginning of your story, or you might be in the middle of it, but putting together your puzzle of health is what we do best! Book in today!
Speaking of journeys, today Theralleve toasts to being in business for 5 YEARS!! To celebrate, we will be donating a portion from every treatment booked in February to Fear is Not Love – a Calgary-based charity to which we have previously donated and that is close to our hearts. Thank you so much for your patronage.
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