Some really great points made. Sorry to hear about your injury! I know how difficult and frustrating that can be.
In my 4th kyu grading I got sprained intercostal muscles (rib area muscles). I think it took me about 2 to 3 months for them to fully heal.
Really best to take it easy with them, especially if fractured or broken. Focus on deep breathing, and yes it will be painful, but they will heal. I even went to the physio and he helped alot, loosened up in between my shoulder blades too which helped alleviate pressure.
Awesome post
@JowGaWolf in saying to really focus on healing. Look into relaxing, breathing, and gentle movements which will encourage a bit of mobility without overdoing it. Go for walks.
I did go back to training even when they weren't fully healed, but I let my instructor know and we worked around it (strikes with rotation were tricky!)
And I know, mentally it will be hard to have a break, but it's a good opportunity to step back and focus on a different aspect of your training, learning about good recovery practices and learning more about safe mobility and flexibility work. You'll be back in no time
This doesn't sound like 2 doctors who don't know what they were talking about. It sounds like something I would say, if I knew the outcome of one action and not the outcome of another. If you had a serious protrusion, then I would definitely go with surgery as my answer, because I know that would fix the protrusion issue. Healing naturally? What does that even mean or consist of. We all know what it doesn't include, but we never know what exactly that natural healing process may consist of.
Sometimes the issue isn't about healing as much as it is about healing correctly. One can break their leg and not set it, and the body will still try to heal it. If it is successful then the body did what it was supposed to do, however because it wasn't set, it may have not healed correctly or in a manner that would allow you to use the leg as you did before. If you have to make a medical statement to a patient then it better be the one that will keep you out of the most legal trouble.
All of this isn't to say that there aren't doctors who really don't know what they are doing. I've had a doctor that I had a degenerative spinal condition and that I would need surgery to stop the back pain. So I took a look at my life and tried to figure out what am I doing throughout the day that may be causing damage to my spine. When I took a look at my bed, I thought maybe the bed was causing the problem. So I slept on the floor to test it out. My back started to get better and the pain was less. Turns out that I didn't need surgery, I just needed a new mattress. The doctor just wanted to make money off of me. There are doctors that are like that. However, his focus doesn't cancel out the value of other doctors.
I use both a good modern medicine doctor and a good alternative medicine doctor. I think of doctors like apples. Just because you bite into a bad one doesn't mean you avoid the rest of the apples on the tree.
Yeah very true, sometimes it's actually more a matter of where their medical perspective and training is.
Last year when I went into emergency 5 times (over a 5 or 6 month period), not to mention multiple, multiple docs appointments, every time they were just scratching their heads. Couldn't count how many possible diagnoses were made, ranging from UTI, to epididymo-orchitis, hernia, urological issue... And it was a muscular issue, which I actually figured out from having to just do my own research. Yep, literally google was my saviour. Not life threatening, but debilitating and life altering in a great deal of ways.
I'm sure there are cases where money is the objective, but here it was simply that their training was too narrow, and they could only see things through a strictly medical perspective, and the fact that there wasn't any cooperation or communication with physios on pelvic issues like this. So they can't really be to blame, if that's what they were trained in, that's where their focus will be and what they will look for.
It did dishearten me, tremendously at the time, but I still won't dismiss the medical side completely. It did however piss me off when two of the doctors/surgeons were discussing in front of me, and one said to me "perhaps we should look into getting you into a pelvic pain clinic" and the other straight away almost snapped back "no that won't help at all, we need to go through a urological pathway." Just the narrowness of view and unwillingness to consider it to be anything but their conclusion.
But yeah always good to get a second opinion on things, but definitely worth listening to the doc about broken ribs.
