“Not intended as medical advice”

I’m familiar enough with this sort of process to know how it might play out:

You visit a physician about a problem. Whenever you move into certain positions like a squat, you experience sharp pain in the front of your hips. You are frustrated or desperate, because this has completely halted your progress. You leave his office with a bill and, over time, an escalating series of recommendations:

• A prescription–something that relaxes tissue or dulls your perception of it.
• An injection–a steroid that could eventually cause more problems than it solves.
• Surgery–arthroscopy is often the way a problem is diagnosed, because an MRI isn’t necessarily accurate.

Worse still, imagine none of these solved the problem, and you’re back where you started, except this time in rehab and in debt.

Now suppose instead, before you left for the doctor’s office, you did a little research. You discover that a biomechanical issue–femoral anterior glide syndrome–matches your symptoms exactly, and can be corrected with simple exercise. It makes sense to at least bring to the doctor’s attention. Maybe they tell you to give the exercises a shot. Maybe this could’ve happened over email. Maybe they were simply unaware of someone’s work; expertise can’t be everywhere at once.

You’re not an expert either, but through search and the internet, you have the power to be a reasoned intermediary. The tragedy is that some doctors think this is a bad thing.