What is the doctor’s job when you have a running injury? Well, I can tell you what it is not. It is not to tell you to stop running. And that is what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
I lecture at lots of medical conferences on running injuries. I was just lecturing at the International Foot and Ankle Foundation meeting in Hawaii. And in one of my very first talks, one of the first cases I presented, I asked one of the doctors sitting on the front row, I said, “What is your most important question about this patient?” And he said, “How did it start?” And I said, “No, you do not care about how it started, you do not care about the injury, you care about the runner’s goals”
The thing is, is when you are seeing a doctor, you probably go to the doctor because your foot hurts, and you want your doctor to fix your foot. If you go there with that approach, that is exactly what you’re going to get. Any doctor can fix your foot, but you need the doctor to focus on your running goals instead. And I was telling these doctors my approach is, and that is kind of the reason for this episode.
I tell them, I say, “The number one most important thing when you’re talking to an injured runner is you need to understand what their goal is. Are they doing the Mermaid Run? Are they doing Ironman Texas? Are they doing the Boston Marathon? The Chicago Marathon? Whatever. You need to know what the goal is, and it needs to be based on their athletic activity and aspirations, not their pain in their foot.”
So, the number one thing that the doctor is supposed to do is help you, the runner, achieve your running goals. The next thing the doctor is supposed to do based on those goals is help you, the runner, meet timelines required to achieve those goals. And then if you’re going to do a race with an injury and it makes the doctor nervous with you doing that race and they think there’s some possibility that that injury could get worse if you’re not paying attention to it, you’re not listening to your body, you’re ignoring the pain, or you’re just so driven that you’re going to actually make the injury worse. The third thing the doctor is supposed to do that is really the doctor’s job is to explain the risk associated with participating in any event given your current stage of healing.
Also, as a part of that, like I just said, we have to tell you about the risk. So, the other thing the doctor, the fourth thing is to really, part of their job is to advise any runner of the serious risks that you might be putting yourself in if you push your timelines moving forward faster. You’re always going to heal, but there are always things that you can do to adjust your speed of healing.
Some of them are more expensive, some of them are more tedious, some of them are more painful, but you have to pick the ones right for you based on your goals, based on your timelines, and based on what you want to do. If you don’t tell your doctor what your goals are, you cannot expect any doctor to do any of the things I just described for you.
Make sure you focus on your goals and make sure you help your doctor stay focused on your goals. That is what is really going to get you back to running a whole lot faster.
If you liked this episode, please like it. Please share it with a runner who needs to hear it, and I’ll see you in the next training.
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