Will Harlow

We now know that there are many things that can cause pain.

And there are studies showing that people who have been through an MRI scanner without pain are just as likely to have some of these injuries in inverted commas as people who do have pain.

So there must be some missing pieces to the puzzle that we hadn't figured out.

Now, one of these is a fear of movement.

And fear of movement is something that triggers muscle spasms.

It tightens everything up.

It restricts the movements of your joints.

And it's primarily driven by what's going on in the neural circuitry.

So like neural inhibition.

Exactly.

And that drives pain up even more.

So I had many people come into the practice who didn't have any obvious injury, but they still had a lot of pain.

And a lot of that was because they were so afraid to move from something having gone wrong a while ago,

that that was now the primary driver of pain.

So figuring out what's causing that fear of movement and then slowly unpicking it can have dramatic effects for people who have suffered with this kind of mechanical pain for a very long time.

And I define independence as being able to do what you want, when you want, for as long as you want, without needing help from someone else unless you want it.

And independence is one of those funny things where we think that people only lose independence in their 80s and 90s and we just don't think about it.

It's one of those things we take for granted that we start to lose a lot earlier than we realize.

So when I was thinking about what actually influences independence, I looked back at the patients I've treated and tried to think, well, what were the reasons that those people had lost independence to begin with?

And it came down to these four things.