Late 20’s male who is an avid golfer presents with chronic left hip pain when swinging his driver or walking and running. This young man has a swing speed of 115+ miles per hour so you have to know that he’s generating tremendous force through his hips. All physical therapy has failed and the only thing to give temporary relief was an injection of a strong pain reliever, Toradol. Toradol comes with significant side effects of creating ulcers, heart disease, kidney failure, and uncontrolled bleeding.
After quickly assessing this patient’s gate and movement patterns, then correlating this with the description of symptoms and sport requirements, I guessed (remember, orthopedics is a guessing game!) that his problem was likely coming from the lateral tension line of his left hip. I could have been wrong and then I would have had to try another direction of tension distortion.
As it turns out, one treatment, working points in the left foot, medial gastrocnemius, and bilateral, lateral hip support muscles, produced 90% improvement that progressed to 99% improvement over 3 days.
Not a single physical medicine therapist had thought to look at the foot. Worse, none asked about trauma there. As it turns out, this patient had a serious fracture in the left forefoot and this was very likely the initial cause of tension distortion along that line; the line that is so critical for power in a golf swing.
Case closed? We shall see! With such chronicity we often need more dosage to clear the pathology in the muscle. So stay tuned.