Labels can be a hindrance and here is why…..
Talking diagnostically, labels can be a very useful and important communication tool, it is scary for people when something is not working in their body and they don’t understand why.
Some patients have said they found it a really valuable part of their therapeutic journey, to be given a little neuro-psycho education about what was going on within their body. It is the uncertainty which can be pretty scary so to understand a little through having a label was reassuring for them.
The problem comes if we use that as an abdication of responsibility to do anything about it. We should take it as a positive, “well, okay, now we’ve got a label, what do we do about it?”
The way that traditional medicine tends to work is to compartmentalise things i.e. there is a condition that responds to this drug regime and this exercise regime/manual therapy approach. The treatment is accepted as the appropriate way to treat this labelled condition and clinicians don’t acknowledge the 20% of people that don’t actually get better with that response.
Here, we take a more individual approach to all patients that we work with, not treating parts of people, but treating whole people. We treat people and not labels; it is a completely unique thing.
To have an understanding of how the body works we look at the disturbances in the way the body is behaving. We can’t really give that a label other than that is you and we need to consider: your story, your history, what is going on and how your body is reacting. How your body presents might describe the problem a little, but there is so much more.
Sometimes a label is given after ticking sufficient boxes in a questionnaire and that’s how a diagnosis is made but it’s not very specific. That is why it is important, during your own healing journey, to not look at yourself as a label.
Try to find somebody who is truly holistic and can look at the mind, the neurological system and the biology. A person with good robust medical training underpinning an understanding that the body is a whole interconnecting system and not just one piece.
That is the root to successful healing – and so that is why labels can be both helpful and a hindrance.
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