The Hidden Spinal Connection to Pain & Injury - Why the Origin of Your Pain Isn't Where You Think
Key insights: 60-second read
- Pain Location ≠ Problem Source - The site of pain (knee, thumb, hip) is often the consequence, not the cause.
- Spinal Connection: Dysfunction in specific spinal segments can manifest as pain in distant body parts.
- Self-Assessment Tools: Use dermatome maps and nerve pathways to identify potential spinal connections.
- Practical Solution: Lacrosse ball therapy on identified spinal segments can provide immediate results.
- Posture Matters: Daily positions and movements can create patterns of spinal stress that lead to problems.
Why Your Pain Isn't Where You Think - With Physiotherapist Grant Frost
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Video Summary
In this important video, Physiotherapist Grant Frost challenges conventional thinking about pain and injury. He reveals why focusing solely on the site of pain (like knees, thumbs, or hips) often misses the root cause, and introduces the crucial concept that spinal dysfunction is frequently the hidden source of peripheral pain. Through clear explanations and a simple car analogy, Grant provides a practical framework for understanding how to identify and address the spinal connections to common aches and pains, including self-assessment techniques using dermatome maps and lacrosse balls.
Video Chapters
The Car Analogy: Understanding the Fuse Box
A really simple way to explain what I find clinically is to use a car analogy. For example, if you were driving down the road at night and one of your headlights suddenly went out, we probably first want to establish whether you were in an accident. Was the reason why your headlight stopped working because it suffered a physical trauma? Did you drive into a post? Did you hit something? Did it break your headlight? Did your knee suffer any obvious damage? Often, we can breeze past that - it's just a simple no for most people.
And much like your mechanic, the next thing that they would probably look for is they would want to assess the headlight itself. They may pull it apart, check the bulb, see what's going on with it. But here's where it becomes interesting. And I think as an industry, a medical industry, as a community, we need to evolve past just looking at the thing that isn't functioning normally.
If you are a mechanic, or you're someone else, and you think, well, the bulb's fine, the headlight looks good. What would be the next thing that you would look for? For most people, you'll probably understand that that headlight is connected by a bunch of wiring to a fuse that sits somewhere in the front of your car, somewhere in your dashboard. We know that in order to control that headlight, there's wiring that connects to the fuses that give that headlight life. And if the headlight looks good and functions normally, then there's a very good chance that something somewhere else was the cause of that.
And this is what we tend to miss when looking at pain and injury - we don't assess the fuse box to see if something is causing a problem somewhere else. Especially because that fuse box is essentially the spine. It is the exit point where all the nerves and neural tissue come from that then travel down to different parts of our body and supply the function and the sensation of that area.
Using Dermatomes and Myotomes to Find the Source
We have a few road maps we can explore to better understand which potential spinal level or levels may be connected to your dysfunction.
Dermatomes are leftover fetal connections that develop in the womb. When we're dealing with things like pain and dysfunction, which are sensations, this can be a genuine road map to help you better understand where to look through your spine for clues as to what might be causing that dysfunction. If you have developed random thumb pain or RSI, you may need to look at the base of your neck. If you've developed any chest pain that thankfully isn't heart related and you're thinking maybe costochondritis, then follow that all the way around to the corresponding levels at the back. If you're lying in bed at night and you can't sleep because the sides of your hips are sore, the cause of that may be coming from a part of your back at the base of your rib cage, the top of your lower back.
Myotomes are similar but tend to associate more with muscle tissue. So, if your dysfunction is muscle weakness or muscle tightness, getting a general sense of which part of your body correlates to which part of your spine, again, can be a great place to look for clues of that hidden dysfunction.
We also want to consider which physical nerves and nerve roots supply the function of that area. For example, if you have knee pain and you know that the musculature around the knee are often supplied in part by the femoral nerve which runs all the way through your thigh and starts at your lower back, then we have something to consider. Not only can dysfunction in your lower back cause the nerve to act dysfunctionally, but if the origin of that nerve at your spine is tight, then anything along the course of that nerve can also become tight, potentially weak, and dysfunctional as well.
Self-Treatment with a Lacrosse Ball
Once you have a general idea about which level of your spine you may need to look for, grab your lacrosse ball or tennis ball. You can lie down on the floor, sit, or stand up against a wall - whatever works best for you.
Take the ball right next to your spine, literally rolling straight off the bony bumps onto the fleshy part. What we're doing here is we're putting pressure through the joints of your spine. We don't want to be on the bumps down the middle. Either side of that are the joints and the soft tissue, muscular tissue that runs either side. We want to be on those spots looking for things that feel stiff, taut, or restricted compared to the other side.
The tricky thing about this is that the dysfunction could be on either side of your spine. For example, if you find stiffness through some joints in your back on the left hand side at the level that corresponds to gluteal function, then your left glute might be tight or your right glute may be weaker depending on how it's expressing itself in your body. We don't need to preempt anything. We don't need to guess.
Here's the process:
- Do a movement or activity that helps you appreciate how your symptoms feel to begin with. Do something that annoys your thumb. Stretch in a way that alerts you to how tight your hip feels. Bend and squat. Use your knee. Get a sense of how it feels.
- Go looking for the corresponding levels you identified through your dermatomes and nerve roots. Look for anything that feels stiff, tight, or restricted on either side.
- Spend enough time physically letting the ball press in. Give it space and time for that soft tissue to give, for the joint capsule to release and free up.
- When you stand up and walk around again, you want to feel like you've worked up and down those levels of your back or neck and you physically feel looser than you did beforehand.
- Base everything on results. Immediately reassess the same exercise or activity that generated your thumb pain, alerted you to how tight your hip felt, or how sore your knee felt. If these parts of your back are influencing your symptoms, you will see some form of an immediate change.
The Important Role of Our Spinal Positions
If you do feel like there's specific parts of your spine that connect up to the issues that you're having, they have to be there for a reason. If we take a person's day-to-day existence from the moment that they wake up to the moment that they fall asleep and consider everything that they do the most throughout the day, for most people, the reality is that they spend a lot of time sitting. Whether that's sitting down watching TV, sitting at a desk, sitting at school, sitting to travel, sitting to relax. The curse of the modern world is that so many of the things we do day-to-day require us to sit.
If you are a chef, someone who works at a checkout, someone who stands and bends over a lot, perhaps you work in the garden or do cleaning - you'll know better than anyone. We need to pay close attention to the exact shapes and postures that you put your spine into the most throughout the day.
There is a very good chance that without you realizing it, you are unknowingly creating a hinge through certain parts of your spine to isolate load. And you are doing that for minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and potentially decades without having noticed. It's this isolated hinging, this specialized local loading, that is abnormal for the body over time - a movement away from an ideal posture. Things become stiffer, tighter, overloaded, one step closer to becoming sore and uncomfortable, but potentially never actually getting there for you to feel that expression somewhere else.
You don't have to have pain in your spine to have spinal dysfunction. For most people, this is one of the hidden secrets to solving problems - we need to go looking for things that your body isn't telling you to look for, but we know may be connected through the channels we spoke about before: dermatomes, myotomes, and the nerves that connect all of this together.
We can't have a conversation about fixing people's problems and looking at things holistically in the right way without having a really boring, annoying conversation about the quality of the shapes and positions that you put your spine into the most throughout the day. If you can't appreciate that and improve upon it where possible, then if you have a persistent issue that's related to that, you may not ever give permission for that to go away forever.
Full Transcript
View Full Transcript
What if I was to tell you that the way that you look at pain, injury, and dysfunction is wrong, and that a slight change in perspective may help you better understand exactly why you have your symptoms and help you reframe what you may need to do to get those symptoms to go away and keep them away forever. My hope is that over the next 10 to 15 years, thanks to videos like this one, that this may become the way that we need to think about pain and injury if we're ever going to conquer this space. So let's dive into it.
Good day. My name is Grant Frost and I'm an Australian musculoskeletal physiotherapist who is extremely passionate about trying to understand the root underlying causes of common aches, pains, injuries, tightnesses, and dysfunctions. And it's this quest to better understand what is the root cause of a person's issues that has often led me to feel that I'm living on an island by myself. That I'm looking at things a certain way that may be different to how a lot of other people in my industry tend to look at the same things. I'm constantly trying very hard to keep an open mind, to be research and evidence-based, but also to base everything that we do on results.
So, when thinking about putting this into a video for you guys, I came to realize that this has the potential to be the most important video that I have ever put out or that I may ever put out in the future based on what we're about to go through. And as I always try and promote on this channel and in person with my patients is I don't want anyone to ever have to trust me with what I say. We need to base what we talk about and what we do on results so that we don't have to guess. And you don't have to trust someone that you haven't met before or maybe throws out some different concepts that you maybe haven't considered before. That is all irrelevant if this stuff doesn't work. But as a physiotherapist over the last 20 years who has invested all my time and energy into this kind of thinking, I'd like to talk to you about the results of what I have found. And to cut a long story short, what I find is when we look at pain, injury, and dysfunction is that collectively we tend to look at the wrong things.
I'm sure you'll agree that if you've ever had an ache, pain, injury, or dysfunction, your focus, much like every other physical therapist, physiotherapist, chiropractor, doctor, health professional, medical professional may just focus solely on where your dysfunction is. If you have a sore knee, we look at your knee. We assess your knee. We treat your knee. We scan your knee. We operate on your knee. But what I see and what I find is that that is often the majority of what we do. And we don't pair it up with a conversation about why that part of your body, that specific part of your body has become injured, painful, sore, damaged, tight, or dysfunctional in the first place.
And yes, there are a small percentage of people who will suffer acute trauma where somebody collides with your knee and damages it. You fall from something, you injure something, accidents happen. But as we'll hopefully explain over the course of this video, even in those moments, the quality of other parts of your body may be the deciding factor which dictates whether you bend or whether your tissue breaks. But for the most part, the aches, pains, injuries, tightnesses, dysfunctions that we're going to reference in this video are essentially the ones where you can't explain why they're there. Perhaps you wake up one day and something hurts. You do something innocuous, something hurts, you do something that you've done plenty of times before and suddenly you don't feel normal. You feel tight, you feel painful, you feel injured or dysfunctional. There has to be a reason why everything that is abnormal or dysfunctional is abnormal or dysfunctional.
There's a lot of common misconceptions that we need to move past when trying to better understand why something is there. Things like age related pain, overuse, sleeping funny, growing pains, bad luck, moved the wrong way. All of these cliches have existed and persisted for so long for good reason because they make sense on the surface, but they fall down 100% of the time when we take a big enough step back and understand what we're about to go through. Aging is normal. Growing is normal. Moving your body is normal. Sleeping is normal. Using your body and using your tissue, especially repetitiously, is also normal. But often times, those situations are really good at exposing hidden underlying dysfunction that you may have taken into that moment. And again, if we're not taking the time to take a step back and realize that that wasn't the cause of your issue, it may have been the last straw. and then go looking for what has built up to the point where you've become dysfunctional and more importantly where that dysfunction is. Then we may never fully realize or understand or be able to solve that dysfunction. We may never be able to stop it from coming back again because we haven't picked on the thing that caused it in the first place. So in short, your knee pain is a consequence of something else. Your thumb pain is a consequence of something else. And the most important part of this video is that that something else is very likely to be a part of your spine.
Clinically as a physiotherapist, the single most important piece of information that I have understood that has helped me better understand why a person's dysfunction is there in the first place and what is necessary to make that go away and stay away forever is understanding the important albeit covert or hidden role of spinal dysfunction in creating peripheral dysfunction.
Key Takeaways
- Pain Location ≠ Problem Source: The site of pain (knee, thumb, hip) is often the consequence, not the cause
- Spinal Connection: Dysfunction in specific spinal segments can manifest as pain in distant body parts
- Self-Assessment Tools: Use dermatome maps and nerve pathways to identify potential spinal connections
- Practical Solution: Lacrosse ball therapy on identified spinal segments can provide immediate results
- Posture Matters: Daily positions and movements can create patterns of spinal stress that lead to problems
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know which spinal level corresponds to my pain?
You can use dermatome maps as a starting point. These show which areas of the body are connected to which spinal segments. For example, thumb pain often relates to the base of the neck (C6), while hip pain may connect to the lower thoracic or upper lumbar spine. The video explains this in more detail.
What if I don't feel any pain in my spine?
That's completely normal and expected. Spinal dysfunction often exists without any local pain. The spine can be stiff, tight, or restricted without sending pain signals directly. This is why it's so often missed as the hidden cause of peripheral issues. The lacrosse ball test helps you find these "silent" restrictions.
How long does it take to see results from spinal self-treatment?
Many people notice an immediate change in their peripheral symptoms after working on the corresponding spinal segment. The goal is to find stiffness, apply gentle pressure, and then re-test your original symptom. Even a slight improvement confirms the connection. Long-term resolution requires consistent work and addressing the postural habits that created the spinal stiffness.
One key insight
"If you've had someone assess your knee, run scans, done all the local testing, but you haven't checked out the corresponding level of your spine that may influence the function of your knee, then you may genuinely be missing the entire picture."
Ready to Find the Real Cause of Your Pain?
If you'd like help uncovering the hidden spinal connections to your symptoms, a thorough assessment can help. Learn more about our physiotherapy services in Port Macquarie.
Want personalised guidance?
If you'd like help with your pain or any other persistent issue, you can book with Grant either in Port Macquarie or via an online telehealth consultation.
