Chapter 10: Hidden In Plain Sight
After all, the ultimate goal of all research is not objectivity, but truth. ~ Helene Deutsch
Dropped in mid-journey? Walk Straight is best experienced from the beginning.
It’s impossible for me to observe babies and young children now without reflecting on my experience raising Hadley and Gehrig. I was a granola mom in the early days of organic food and milk alternatives, deeply immersed in the hows and whys of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral child development. The body had been my lifelong challenge, but because they were not born with an anomaly, I figured, “Yay! Hooray! Moving on…” I had no idea at the time that we could contribute, for better or worse, to their musculoskeletal future too.
Adults are grown children. We know this. And yet there’s a disconnect when it comes to the impact of physical patterns set in motion during infancy, reinforced throughout childhood, and compounded in adulthood. How have we not connected the dots?
It’s a paradox we humans fall prey to more than we like to admit. We’re exceptional at putting on blinders to what we don’t want to see, especially when it involves ingrained cultural habits we enjoy or rely on. Think smoking and butter in the past, ultra-processed foods and diet soda now. It seems 100% obvious in hindsight, and yet... we miss it. We draw conclusions too early, name causes before considering context, and chase fixes while skipping over the systems that would make sense of it all.
While there’s no shortage of studies on movement, there are myriad variables at play in both the subjects and the researchers. In other words, people, priorities, and perspectives can skew findings. A study designed to gain insight can also unintentionally mislead, especially if we’re looking for what we want to see, zooming in too closely on one thing while overlooking another.
This very disconnect between the micro and macro played out, in almost absurd clarity, at the doctor’s office about a year into my daughter’s MS diagnosis. Her neurologist, as was his habit, was sharing all the latest studies with us. One concluded that moderate alcohol consumption was beneficial for MS patients. When I heard this, I was gobsmacked. The National Library of Medicine states that “Alcohol can affect several parts of the brain, but, in general, contracts brain tissues, destroys brain cells, as well as depresses the central nervous system… ” And yet, this study was advising people whose brains are already under neurological attack to consume alcohol.
“How can they possibly conclude that alcohol is good for a brain with MS when it’s not even good for a healthy one?” I asked. The doctor explained that the study had found a reduction in episodes among those who drank moderately. While I tried to wrap my head around that, he went on to describe similar benefits found in yoga, meditation, exercise, and talk therapy. All had shown similar positive outcomes for Multiple Sclerosis patients. He reminded me how deeply stress affects those with MS, and that any form of stress relief seemed to help.
“Well then, couldn’t it be that alcohol, when used moderately, is simply acting as a stress reducer too? That it’s not the alcohol itself, but the reduction in stress that’s having the positive effect?” I followed up. The doctor nodded. “That makes sense.” “Then why doesn’t the study say that?” I continued. “Was there a control group that didn’t drink but practiced other stress-reducing methods?” At the time, there wasn’t.
I was appalled. By focusing on only one facet of the equation, the study could compel a patient who is already trying everything to support their body to begin drinking moderately, believing it would be an added plus. Or it could encourage or excuse a patient who would be much better served by practicing a healthier form of stress relief to drink instead.
This is a clear example of how myopic research can unintentionally fail us. Isolating one behavior or variable without considering the wider system undermines awareness rather than enhancing it. And just because the implications aren’t immediate does not mean they don’t exist. This is true across all complex systems. As someone who has worked with real bodies for decades, not in labs or through devices, but in studios and homes, in pain and recovery, I see how easily flawed assumptions get built into our expectations and care plans.
The problem isn’t just that we overlook elements in how we inhabit our bodies; we misunderstand their relationship to the bigger picture. Anything that isn’t required to get us from point A to point B is regarded as an optional extra, overwhelming, easy to ignore, or only relevant in certain cases. However, some details are essential and foundational. They don’t just support one movement or fix one issue; they organize everything. Learn them once, and you use them everywhere. Ignore them, and you spend your life treating avoidable symptoms for decades. That’s the part we often miss. Simplicity isn’t the absence of detail. It is the presence of structure.
In the report “Musculoskeletal Disorders A Universal Source of Pain and Disability Misunderstood and Mismanaged: A Critical Analysis Based on the U.S. Model of Care”, Khalid Malik and colleagues found that:
“Musculoskeletal disorders are the leading source of pain and disability globally but are especially prevalent in the industrialized nations, including the US …”
“… care provided to patients with musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) is highly variable and has regularly been shown to have suboptimal outcomes. The many reasons for this ineffective care include the mutable nature of the prevailing syndromes and their limited and variable understanding…”
“Treatments that are unable to apprehend the causative pathological processes, which are therefore progressive, cause irreversible damage to the respective musculoskeletal structures, and result in enduring pain and disability.”
In short, musculoskeletal disorders, not cancer, not heart disease, are the leading cause of pain and disability worldwide. Yet the care remains inconsistent, often ineffective, and rooted in limited understanding. This isn’t a fringe opinion; it’s a peer-reviewed analysis of a widespread public health failure, playing out across the population. Contrary to popular belief, issues involving the joints and spine don’t just affect the old, overweight, or sedentary. They’re just as prevalent in the young, fit, and even elite athletes.
We got here because of how we think. We treat children’s bodies as if they’re separate from the adults they become. We chase outcomes, label problems, and skip over the details that support our foundational mechanics. In other words, we’ve been overriding nature’s framework and are now trying to innovate our way out of problems the medical field itself describes as having “limited and variable understanding.”
Discomfort has become an expected part of aging or modern life. But more often than not, rather than inevitable, it’s the consequence of a collective misunderstanding of how healthy function develops, combined with short-sighted care. The missing pieces were never missing at all; just misread, dismissed, or waiting in plain sight.
Sometimes, all it takes is a shift in perspective or a nugget of information considered in a new light to spark the ah-ha moment that changes everything! Subscribe for free to get a new chapter delivered to your inbox each week! XxD
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