Show notes
How important is terminology to solving your problems? Poor use of language can trap you in pain.
Transcript: Hey, everybody! Welcome to Episode 13 of the Upright Health Podcast. This is Matt Hsu. And today, we're going to be talking about “sloppy thinking down a slippery slope.” So I had a discussion with a guy a couple weeks ago in the locker room about some of the issues he was having with his hip and knee. A couple of us were in the locker room after a pickup game, just talking about how we're going to be stretching our hips in different ways. And we were all very excited to be stretching in different ways and another guy chimed in and said that he had been working on different ways to stretch his hips because he had been having some knee and hip issues. And basically, the doctors had said, “Well, might be some Tendinitis near the knee. It might be Piriformis. It might be your SI Joint.” And when he said “SI Joint,” I said, “That doesn’t even makes sense.” And then we got into a debate about whether or not terminology is really that important when you're discussing things like this. And my contention is that you need to be very, very, very, very clear when you are using language about cause and effect, and you're dealing with the human body. So you know, he was saying it might be the tendon. It might be Piriformis. Both of those, I could say, “Okay, let’s make some sense. Those are soft tissues that can affect things. That makes sense.” And then when he said “SI Joint,” I said, “That doesn’t make sense. The joint doesn’t control anything.” And that’s when he said, “No, no, no, no, it is the joint but blah, blah, blah.” And I said, “Look, the joint is just two bones meeting. The joint is the space where two joints meet. It doesn’t include the muscles around the joint.” Sometimes when we're just sort of talking casually, we may say, “Oh, yeah, SI Joint includes all muscles around that joint.” But when we're trying to be very clear, the joint is simply where two bones meet. And when we think about it that way, we need to realize that that is not going to cause you any issues, right? Even if you have signs of joint degeneration in any joint, it's not, not, not, not, not a sign that the joint degeneration is causing you pain. Quite to the contrary, right? There have been many studies that show that signs of joint degeneration do not correlate at all to whether or not you have pain. So when we say, “Oh, a joint is causing you pain,” we have to actually back up and realize that the joint is probably not doing anything. If you have a skeleton lying in the dirt with no muscle, no soft tissue and no brain sending any commands to anything, you have a skeleton that isn't moving, right? It's not going to do anything. You're not going… that skeleton is clearly not experiencing pain, whether from joint degeneration or from the lack of a brain. So we got into this discussion about a concise use of language and that's an idea that is extremely, extremely important to me as somebody who has studied literature and tried to learn a number of languages in my life. I think the clearer use of language is fundamental to having a good discussion on anything, and to solving any problem. You just have to be very clear about all the words to you use. And so this whole discussion got me thinking about how sloppy we can get when we start talking about a cause of pain in our body. And I'm realizing I'm going back to the whole arthritis idea again, and I hope you are not tired of me beating this horse but the idea of arthritis is that we're looking at signs of degeneration in the joint where you have pain and we say arthritis is causing you pain. To even get the diagnosis, you already have the pain and then you have the joint degeneration and then you say you have arthritis, then you say the arthritis is causing you pain. This is not really true, right? We're looking at arthritis with its pain a