(Knee Pain Continued)

your body’s alarm clock. If you shut off the alarm without first getting out of bed, you run the risk of greater consequences later. If you are one of these people please stop and think about this for a minute.

Mark had to ask himself those questions before he finally came to my office for his first visit. The main reason Mark was convinced to come in was because one of my other clients kept hounding him. Mark had been diagnosed with IT band syndrome on his left outer knee and a strain on the inside of that same knee. Before coming in Mark had seen his primary care doctor and a podiatrist who had given him orthotics. And as an obvious skeptic, he was not very interested in chiropractic work. It seemed that Mark felt that between his doctor and himself, they had all of the answers. I can’t say this for certain, but it also seemed that Mark doubted my ability to help his circumstance because I am not a doctor. Mark was a pretty intelligent and analytical guy with a PhD. And sometimes they are the hardest people to convince. He told me about his health history and what he thought was going on with his knee. When I asked him why he thought his knee wasn’t getting better, he was stumped. All he could say was, “I don’t know” and for a moment we stood there in awkward silence.

I broke the silence by telling him what I would be doing during the evaluation as well as explaining my basic philosophy on how muscle imbalances will affect his alignment and joint function. But, even after I pointed out his deviations and explained how those deviations were causing his knee pain he was still not accepting it. It was pretty obvious that only way I was going to make Mark a believer was to make him feel better.

In order to establish a baseline to show progress, I asked Mark where he would rate his pain level and to tell me what movements gave him