Preventing Injury
Is it possible?
Absolutely. Many injuries can be avoided, and most injuries can be less severe with adequate preventative actions in place. Would you rather get treatment for a painful injury you have sustained or avoid the injury altogether? This is not a difficult question to answer, yet injury management, and indeed medicine in general, often remains focused on cure rather than prevention.
How can injury be prevented?
Effective injury prevention will never truly occur until people take complete responsibility for their own bodies and actions. This is something we, as a society, are not currently doing so well.
In our current culture, external faults are often blamed for our misfortunes. We are losing the ability to think proactively about our own circumstances.
We all have a phenomenal capacity to make 'accidents' happen much less frequently if we committe to simple strategies and increase our awareness. Our Injury Prevention Tips, Injury Risk Indicator and Before You Break book are all designed to help you to avoid injury.
Karen Finnin, author of Before You Break writes:
The ultimate objective of health professionals is to care for people. Generally we are very good at it, in fact, sometimes a little too good at it. Caring well for patients makes us feel good about ourselves to the point where, subconsciously and surreptitiously, we support the patient’s notion that they need us to get them better.
In reality, given the right coaching and tools, injured patients can often make themselves better. Naturally, this will not be the case with all injuries, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Taking this a step further, with the right coaching and tools, you can dramatically decrease your own risk of getting injured in the first place. It doesn’t cost much, and it doesn’t take much time.
The role of health professionals should be less about creating dependency by performing treatment techniques on you, and more about being your coach and number one fan guiding you to fix yourself. This is why i wrote Before You Break.
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