To all who can’t get to their physiotherapist, osteopath, chiropractor or massage therapist for ongoing maintenance during this 2020 COVID-19 lockdown – time to reflect.

Maybe you can do just fine without it?

In this strange time, you might just be regaining your power.

One moment…

Let’s just have an important caveat here. There are some exceptions, where conditions are chronic (although never be afraid to get a 2nd or 3rd opinion, if someone tells you you have a chronic condition), various therapies can help with short-term pain relief and this is of course of great value when you’ve got pain. You might just feel wonderfully loose and more mobile. So too, a nice massage offered with kindness and attentiveness can really help with anxiety and depression. We might call this self-care or just plain being kind to your body. What I’m talking about here is the regular maintenance you were advised to have.

Locked down

So here you are, stuck at home and the pandemic lockdown means you’ve had no maintenance for at least two months with no idea when you can get your next fix. Now what? Well you’re likely going to go one of two ways. Hopefully you may be heading towards an empowering realisation – that you just don’t need maintenance. Maybe you’re just fine, or perhaps you can survive those pesky little flare-ups because they just seem to disappear all by themselves, or perhaps a nice walk and a relaxing bath seem to keep you going. Congratulations, you’ve reclaimed your independence and going to save lots of money.

But what if you’re unlucky? If you’ve come to believe that you really do need that click, crack, rub or pull to function, then you’ve been disabled by that most powerful of human emotions, fear. Fear that your back is going to ping, your pelvis is just tilting in the wrong damned direction or your shoulder won’t sit in the right place unless someone does something to you every week or month ad infinitum. Now you’re dependent and there’s more bad news, these unhelpful beliefs have really big unwanted effects; you become less likely to explore movement, you avoid the DIY, or stop the long walks, and you can even experience greater levels of pain as your nervous system goes to high alert and your body tenses up because you’re just too scared to lift something because big trouble looms just around the corner. What a mess.

All because you’ve been deprived of the very thing you didn’t need in the first place.

This is called an iatrogenic effect (‘brought forth by the healer’), an adverse effect caused by the diagnosis or treatment itself. Maintenance breeds reliance and dependency and this lowers self-efficacy – your beliefs about your ability to do things. It reinforces unhelpful beliefs about your body, that perhaps if you don’t get the fix, something really bad’s gonna happen.

Words really matter

How did that habit begin? Think about these three statements:

“You seem to be much better… you should go onto regular maintenance.”

“You seem to be much better… but it’s a good idea to have ongoing maintenance.”

“You seem to be much better… I’m here if anything goes wrong.”

Which sounds the most empowering to you? After all, if you’re not getting better over time, by what measure could you know it works? It doesn’t.

I’m going to end by telling you an amazing little secret. One of the best predictors of a positive therapeutic outcomes, is the belief that it will work, and that goes for bogus therapies too. Shhhhhh, you didn’t hear it from me. So what would happen if you believed your body was robust, and safe to move and explore?

Try it.