Today on the Doc on the Run podcast, we’re talking about two questions that prove to me your stress fracture grading is useless.
If you are a runner with a stress fracture, you do not really care what a doctor calls it. You care if you can run, you care if you can work out, you care if you have to sit around in a fracture walking boot and do nothing.
I can tell you that most of the time runners call me and they are trying to get an answer from me on what they can do, I know their stress fracture grading is useless. The reason for that is because I just asked two questions based on it and if you ask your doctor these same two questions, it will help you figure out whether or not you can get back to activity a whole lot faster.
The first question is whether or not you can actually add activity right now. So, if your doctor says, oh, you have a grade for a tibial stress fracture, you can say, so what? Does that mean I can do activity now or does it mean I cannot do activity now. The important follow-up question, the second one that proves it useless is when you say, well, when will I be able to add activity based on that particular stress fracture grade.
Most of the ones that doctors give you do not tell you that at all. They’re based on some finding on an MRI and x-ray or something else, and they don’t prognostically or predictably tell you when you are going to be able to do stuff. Now, if you want to understand what you can do, you have to think about things you can assess yourself. This is about how much it hurts, what it looks like, whether it’s swollen, if it’s improving, what activities you can do before it starts to ache and hurt and everything else.
Those are things I ask you because they’re more useful than these other stress fracture grading systems and the questions I ask you have nothing to do with that. I never ask a patient, what did your doctor tell you? Was it a grade three on the Miller scale? Was it on the Saxena’s CT grading scale used for navicular fractures? I don’t care about any of that stuff. I care about how it feels and these are things you can all ask yourselves.
That stuff I have for you is on the stress fracture severity worksheet. It’s the thing I put together for you. I have it available for you for free. You can get it at www.stressfracturesecrets.com and that will give you a lot of information that I know doctors don’t even ask you because it seems like patients are surprised every day they call me.
Just today, I was on calls with a couple of different runners who actually have stress fractures and are trying to figure out what to do and one of them, it really struck me when she said, well, I just have never really tracked my discomfort before and I’ve never thought about all the things you gave me to do. They are things that are in the stress fracture severity worksheet.
It’s the exact same questions. So, I don’t have secret questions that I ask patients. I just ask patients a lot of questions that would help you figure it out on your own. If you were doing it on your own and you can go through all those questions, it’s two pages, it’s free, it’s a PDF, you can print it out, fill it out. You don’t have to fill it out online and submit it to me. That’s not how it works.
It’s just a tool that you can use to get more information for yourself or to share with your doctor to actually look at it in a little more detail. So, then you can ask them, okay, now, instead of based on my Miller classification scheme, instead of based on this x-ray that you said doesn’t have a crack on it, if you think about these things, about this is what I actually see and feel and know, can I do activity right now? If not, when can I start doing activity?
You can fill this out and you can complete it and come up with a whole lot more detail to go back to your doctor and say, okay, when can I do activity? If not now, what can I do to speed up the process to get back to activity based on this information in conjunction with what you see that made you come up with that number that you used to grade my stress fracture. That’s a much more effective way for any runner to get back to running a whole lot faster. So go get it, download it, www.stressfracturesecrets.com.
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