“Your Back Pain Is Caused By Your Rotated Hips” | Busting Movement & Pain Myths | Series with Dr. DePalma and Dr. Camoratto

by | Jan 7, 2019 | 0 comments

The myth that your back pain is caused by your rotated hips is largely told by clinicians to their patients. Unfortunately, the evidence does not support this.

Clinicians are doing a disservice to their patients by telling them that they have rotated hips and their hips are out of alignment. There is no backing to this claim.

Our ability to assess bony landmarks is too poor for it to be used as a valid diagnostic procedure. Even if we could palpate motion well, hip movement is so small that it is defined as undetectable. This means that our ability to diagnose hip pathology is limited.

So why should a clinician not still tell a patient that they may have some hip pathology? Because this affects the patient’s mentality. Read the myth “Pain Equals Damage” to learn more about what pain is, and you will understand that pain is not just due to physical reasons.

When a clinician tells a patient that they have rotated hips, the patient believes them and does not know that this claim has no backing. The patient now believes that they have a problem that can not be fixed or even worse, that it can only be fixed by the clinician. This diagnosis is nocebic language, or words that have detrimental effect on outcomes through psychological or psychosomatic factors. With a nocebic diagnosis the patient will have a negative expectation of the prognosis.

The Movement Dr. is here to educate, empower, create independence and resilience so that you can live pain-free!

If you have ever been told that your back pain is caused by your rotated hips or are just experiencing any sort of back pain, get in touch with me today so we can get you on an evidence-based and honest path to being pain-free.

Interested in learning more about common movement and pain myths? Check out all of these myths.

Source:

Cooperstein, Hickey. The Reliability of palpating the posterior iliac spine: a systematic review. 2016.

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