So I have a friend named Rohan. Rohan, when he was younger, raced motorcycles. This will be important to know at the end of the story. Rohan can’t eat ice cream. Here’s why:
So Rohan gets older. One day, he wakes up with excruciating chest pains. So he goes to the doctor. Starts getting a bunch of tests. Like often happens, the doctors keep testing him, not the heart, let’s test this, let’s test that. Finally, they found something wrong. He has gallstones! It must be that!
At this point, put your hand over your gall bladder. It’s on the right side of your body, at the line between your stomach and your liver.
Now put your other hand over your heart. How did his chest pain get from his gall bladder over a foot away to his chest? Through the magic of transferred pain. So the doctors tell him You don’t need your gall bladder, so we’ll take it out.
Yeah, No. you pretty much need everything in your body, even your appendix. In specific, your gall bladder stores extra gall, which is used to digest extra fat, in like say, ice cream.
So my friend gets out of the hospital, can’t eat ice cream, which of course he does, because “hey, ice cream!” He’s still getting chest pains, so he traded ice cream for nothing.
Discouraged, he takes his dog for a walk. Being a naturally gregarious person, he starts talking to one of this neighbors in his rich Mill Valley neighborhood. His neighbor listens to his tale of medical woe, squints at him. Fires up his pinky, and pokes him.
Rohan falls over into the street. The neighbor said,
“You don’t have a heart problem or a gall bladder problem, you have a musculloskeletal problem. I happen to be one of the leading experts in that. Were you in an accident when you were younger? Did you do all of your physical therapy?
Rohan said “I used to race motorcycles, and no, I didn’t do all my PT”.
Neighbor said, “Yeah, thought so. So what happened is that you’ve been using the wrong muscles to move around for years, to compensate for your injury, and they finally went on strike. We need you to do some PT for awhile, and it will hurt, but your chest pains will go away.”
So Rohan did that, and he was fine in 2 weeks of PT. Though he can’t eat ice cream any more.
Moral of this story:
- Do all your PT.
- Don’t let doctors cut things off or out of you unless they can put it back.