Propel Fitness Journal, Issue 075
There’s an acronym clinicians use behind closed doors.
VOMIT.
Victim Of Medical Imaging Technology.
The fact that rehab professionals needed a name for this should tell you something about how often it happens.
The Scan Found Something. It Always Does.
Put a room full of pain-free lifters through an MRI and radiology will have a field day.
Disc bulges. Degeneration. Tendon “changes.” Labral fraying.
Roughly a third of pain-free people in their twenties show disc degeneration on imaging. By eighty, nearly everyone does.
These findings are wrinkles on the inside.
But the report doesn’t read like wrinkles. It reads like a crime scene.
And most lifters never get told the difference.
The Report Did More Damage Than the Disc
Two lifters. Same herniation on paper.
One has pain and can’t touch his toes. The other has full range and zero symptoms.
Same label. Completely different problem.
The label doesn’t write the plan. Your presentation does — what you can tolerate, what you can’t, what provokes symptoms and what doesn’t.
But hand a lifter a scary report and watch what happens.
He stops deadlifting. He starts guarding. Every twinge becomes evidence. His nervous system goes on red alert — and now he’s got two problems, and the second one is harder to fix.
I’ve lived this. Three physios read my file, saw the herniation, and treated a diagnosis. None of them treated a weightlifter. That approach bought me two and a half years of chronic pain.
What Imaging Is Actually For
I’ll never say no to more data. Imaging has real jobs:
Deciding whether surgery is on the table. Ruling out red flags. Investigating when months of well-run conservative care have genuinely failed.
Notice what’s not on that list.
Routine curiosity three weeks into an episode of back pain. A clinic ordering pictures to look thorough. A practitioner pointing at a grainy image and telling you to never lift again.
If the image won’t change the plan, the image is just ammunition for fear.
Your scan is context.
Your capacity is the plan.
I went deep on this — imaging, the fear-mongering that cost me two and a half years, and how injured lifters actually get back under the bar — on the Beyond Coaching podcast this week. Listen here
– Dan
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