Question the Experts

Four or five years ago I ran a half-marathon.  It was my second attempt and my friend and I hadn't trained all that much.  The first time I ran one I had trained hard, but had not been able to run the whole thing.  So the second time around I surprised myself by running (jogging slowly) the whole thing.  My friend and I celebrated that it had hurt so much but that we had pushed through it.  And when I tried to run again just a few short weeks later, I learned that I had really hurt my knee.  I hadn't run very far when I got shooting pain next to my knee.  It hurt to run, it hurt to jog, it hurt to walk.  So I stopped and went home.  I tried again later.  I got the same pain in my knee.  Rest wasn't helping, it wasn't getting better.  And it hurt really bad.
Hawaii has great health insurance, so I went to a doctor.  I googled an orthopedic surgeon in Kailua.  I didn't do any research on who she was, I just went.  It was the usual sit around in the waiting room until the doctor can see you 15 minutes late, then sit in the waiting room for 15 minutes by yourself deal.  I guess we are all pretty used to this, unfortunately.  Then I got to see the Doctor.  She asked me a lot of questions and did some manual examinations on my legs.  She manipulated the knee and finally instructed me to go with someone she was going to send for to get some x-rays done to see what was going on in there.  Before setting off to fetch her assistant she gave me a talk about different kinds of knee pains.  She talked a lot about how many people are not meant to run, especially if something was a little different in one leg than the other (one of my legs is a hare shorter than the other).  She then also went on to talk about how often she will do x-rays on elderly gentlemen and she will find a form of cancer that is causing the pain, often in the hips.  Right after she mentioned cancer, she left the room.  And I sat there for 15 minutes thinking about cancer and how I will never run again.  I went to take the x-rays and she determined that I would need to get an MRI on my knee to figure out what was going on since she couldn't see anything in the films.  Then she gave me another talk about how I should never run again (I don't remember exactly what she said, but this was the basic gist).  Then she sent me off to the hospital to get an MRI done.
I followed her instructions like a good girl, got the MRI done and then went home in a panicky depression.  I would never run again.  There's something wrong with my body.  I've done some real damage.  I never went to pick up the results of the MRI.  I never scheduled a follow-up appointment with the lovely Doctor.  And I stopped running totally for about a year.
It's not that I didn't want to look at the MRI because there might be something I wouldn't like in the results.  I'm not one to go into that kind of denial.  If there's something wrong I generally want to know what I can do to fix it or make it better.  It was more that there was something about the way the doctor treated me.  Something about the way she brought up cancer and left me alone.  Something about how she sucked all hope out of my recovery.  Looking back I realize that it was the first time that a doctor told me something and I didn't just blindly accept it.  Doctor's words were like the word of God.  If a doctor told me something I believed it.  But I didn't accept her message and it took me a really long time to figure that out.  I had to mourn the death of my implicit trust in all medical professionals.  I began to consider that doctors are humans. And that although they had gone to school for a very long time and learned a considerable amount about the human body and their specialties, they are not infallible.
I began to research the kind of pain I had.  I looked specifically at runner's blogs and discovered that the kind of pain I have is pretty common.  It is caused by tight, unstretched muscles, a lack of cross-training and strengthening other muscles and a tight IT band.  Turns out there's things you can do to help with the pain and a foam roller does a great job of stretching your IT band.  I tested out what I had learned.  I started kickboxing which strengthened all my muscles, not just my running muscles.  I started stretching and icing.  I worked on my running technique in short bursts.  If it started to hurt at all, I stopped what I was doing.  And you know what?  It worked.  I will not be running any marathons or half-marathons any time soon, and I actually have no motivation to do so.  But I have been able to compete in 3-5 mile trail races with obstacle courses.  I can run when it is involved in a crossfit workout.  I have regained all of my functional running skills and have gotten myself to a point where there is little to no pain involved.
The moral of the story is this: go to the doctor, listen to the doctor, question the doctor, do your own research.  If your heart and intuition are telling you that the doctor is not spending enough time with you, or the doctor's words are not sitting right with you, You Might Be Right.  Do not fear a second opinion.  Do not let doctors bully you when you go into their kingdoms armed with your own knowledge, intuition and research.  Do not let the doctor make you feel stupid or hopeless.  And for the most part this means that you will follow their prescription..  They very often know what they are talking about.  I almost always take the medicine they prescribe.  I can think of only one other time that I didn't and it involved medication that would have caused side effects worse than the problem they were trying to fix.
So question the experts.  This goes not just for doctors, but government officials, researchers, spiritual and religious leaders, your boss, your mother, your best friend.  Ask for help, listen to what they say, and then follow your intuition.

Ain't No Stoppin Me Now!