What are the two real reasons doctors tell you to not run with a stress fracture? Well, that is what I am going to share with you today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
There is nothing more frustrating than being a runner, has found out they have a stress fracture that barely hurts, does not really ache, is not really swollen and the x-ray in the doctor’s office does not even show a crack. In fact, it leaves you scratching your head. You are like, well, a fracture is supposed to be a crack, but you do not see a crack and you are telling me I am going to come back and redo another x-ray, look for a crack later and in the meantime, I cannot run at all.
Well, why is that? Well, there are a couple of reasons. In fact, there are two. There are two reasons I find that doctors do not actually let runners run and they just tell you cannot run while you have this stress fracture.
The first one is that they are not really sure how bad the fracture really is. What I mean by that is that you know for sure something is off because they poked around on your foot. It hurts a little bit here. It hurts a little bit there. It does not hurt almost everywhere else. And they got an x-ray and there is no actual crack visible on the x-ray and so they do not really know how bad it is.
They say, well, you know, if we got a CT scan or we got an MRI, there might be a crack on there. Or if we got an ultrasound, we might see some fluid in between the bone and the covering of the bone, but I do not really think there’s a crack there and you are confused, right? You are thinking, well, you said that you think there’s a crack, but there is no crack on the x-ray and there might be a crack on an MRI. There might be a crack on a CT, or you might see some fluid on an ultrasound, but you do not know. So, you know from what the doctor just told you, the doctor actually really has no idea how bad it is. She does not know at all.
The second reason doctors tell you that you cannot run when you have a stress fracture is they do not have time to help you figure out how bad it really is. What do I mean by that? Well, there’s a worksheet that I created. When you go to the doctor’s office, you probably filled out a bunch of pages. Most of them related to insurance and HIPAA forms and stuff like that. But this is an extremely detailed thing that I give to runners to ask them, what should I do? Like, how can I figure this out? Well, this is how I figure this out.
These are the questions I ask you. I ask you to fill out all of this detail. Not send it to me, but I ask them when I’m talking to you on webcam to try to figure out how bad it is. Well, I do not do webcams for new patients for 15 minutes because it takes a lot longer than that and most doctors do not have an hour to spend with you. Now, you have an hour to spend yourself because you probably spent more than an hour listening to podcasts or watching YouTube videos or reading articles or whatever to try to figure it out yourself.
So, if you actually do the right thing and you ask yourself the right questions, you can figure it out a whole lot faster. And if you have to go see a doctor and you already have all this detail and you can share it with them, it will also help them figure it out. Keep in mind, one of the things that is not a reason for doctors to tell you to not run is that they do not want you to run.
All doctors want you to get better. All doctors want you to run if you are a runner and you want to run. But it’s time consuming, tedious, and many times difficult for them to do it with the standard things and a standard doctor visit. Taking an x-ray is fast. Getting an MRI, it takes more time to write a letter to get prior authorization than it does to see you in the office in most cases and then it could take weeks.
By that time, they’re thinking, what’s the point? You go through all this trouble, write a letter, get prior authorization. We have to wait for it to get scheduled. Then you go see the imaging facility, get the thing. We have to wait for the MRI to be read by the radiologist and then finally get a report days after that. It could take weeks for that to happen. Same thing with a CT scan or an ultrasound if they do not have an ultrasound machine in their office. But an x-ray is cheap. It just does not show you that much and it does not tell you a whole lot about severity.
But detail on what you feel, what you see, and how the thing responds to other things you try, that is how you figure out how bad it really is. But if you do not know how bad it is, you can’t run on it. And so, if the doctor does not know and have the time to help you figure it out, you just can’t run. That is why it works that way.
If you want to get that worksheet, you can get it for free. You can download it, print it out, fill it out, share it with your doctor, do whatever you want with it. You can get it for free at www.stressfracturesecrets.com.
«« #986 The 2 worst things about inflammation with a stress fracture |