Functional Medicine
Pain & functional limitations
Regulatory and preventive medicine
Dr. med. univ. Klaus Wachter
Introduction to a new medical perspective (details)
Limitations of imaging techniques
However, conventional medicine still pays little attention to this complex information network as a diagnostic tool. The current diagnostic trend is moving more and more towards instrumental medicine.
Hardly any patient is examined in detail and the body's own perception and description of their own symptoms are seen as disruptive to the diagnostic process. Ie. Patients are increasingly gaining the impression that their subjective feelings and their own competence for diagnosis are misleading and therefore more emphasis must be placed on imaging procedures.
Although many studies now show that, for example, imaging (X-rays, MRI) is not useful for diagnosing back pain because functional disorders cannot be depicted.
"In around 90 percent of those affected, imaging cannot identify a serious organic cause of the pain, and most CT and MRI findings are questionable as to whether they have anything to do with the pain.
As a rule, the symptoms are myofascial, psychosocial or somatoform. In such cases, imaging often proves to be harmful because it raises fears with unclear findings and, with subsequent examinations, promotes the chronification of the pain. " Medical newspaperNovember 15, 2016."
A large systematic literature review,
for example, shows that 37% of all 20-year-olds and 84% of all 80-year-olds exhibit changes in MRI imaging. However, this cohort of 3110 individuals is entirely asymptomatic.
"Systematic literature review of imaging features of spinal degeneration in asymptomatic populations." AJNR Am J Neuroradiol. 2015 Apr;36(4):811-6. doi: 10.3174/ajnr.A4173. Epub 2014 Nov 27. Brinjikji et al.
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It seems that conventional models cannot always explain the symptoms of our patients. There is often a lack of effective diagnostics to capture certain acute or chronic pain conditions that cannot be adequately explained by traditional diagnostic methods, which do not include the fascia.
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By considering the fascia as the generator and the sensory organ for pain, a diagnosis is achieved in most cases.​