While working with patients early in his career, Moseley observed that the attitudes health care providers displayed, and the language they used, could actually worsen their patients’ discomfort. Terms such as degenerated, desiccated, stuck, bone-on-bone, jammed, out of alignment, locked and twisted can color a patient’s self-perception of pain.
Instead of describing pain with such daunting and imprecise language, says Moseley, it should be reframed as a smart, protective mechanism that sometimes goes off the rails. Pain is modulated by context, expectations and experience, so what the practitioner says to the patient makes a big difference.…