Why can two people have the same diagnosis, but completely different pain?

One of my favourite parts of this work is that,
even after all these years,
I continue to be surprised.
Early on,
one question kept puzzling me.
How can two people be told they have exactly the same diagnosis,
yet one can hardly lift their arm,
while the other gets on with life almost normally?
If the diagnosis is the same,
what is creating such a different experience?
In my early years,
I never felt that question was answered particularly well.
Then I started noticing something else.
When we tested people's bodies carefully,
the diagnosis often wasn't telling the whole story.
Not long ago,
Jan's shoulder reminded me why.
The rotator cuff tear diagnosis pointed to the shoulder,
which seemed completely reasonable.
After all, that's where the pain was.
But when we started testing,
Jan's body kept leading us somewhere else.
Neither of us knew where
the biggest change was going to come from.
For Jan, it came from releasing a problem around T7,
in the middle of the thoracic spine.
We immediately retested the shoulder.
The movement improved.
The pain reduced.
Nothing about the diagnosis had changed.
That is why two people can have the same diagnosis,
yet experience completely different pain.
The diagnosis may be the same.
The protection may not be.
That made me realise that perhaps we have been asking one question,
when we actually need to ask two.
The first question is,
"What is the diagnosis?"
That's an important question.
But more importantly for fixing the pain,
there's another one.
"What is our brain protecting?"
Those two questions sometimes lead to exactly the same place.
In my experience, more often than not, they don't.
And when they don't,
it can completely change where the most important problem is discovered.
That is why we don't stop with the diagnosis.
We test.
We see what our body is protecting.
Our body tells us whether we've discovered something important.
People occasionally ask me
how to explain what we do
to someone else.
Perhaps this is the simplest way I can put it.
A diagnosis tells us what has been identified.
Testing helps us discover what our brain is still protecting.
And that can make all the difference.
I hope you found that as interesting as I have over the years.
I'll share another one with you soon. 👊