Nothing in the body happens at random. This includes chronic pain.

Even if the dozens of doctor’s and specialists you have consulted have failed to identify why you’re in pain, it’s still not random. The body has a reason.

At Saint Bartholomew, we believe that there are four systems of the body that contribute significantly to pain.

If you are in pain, one or more of these systems has broken down somewhere.

When I was left the NBA and began working with the general public I was struck by how poor their test scores were.

This is an sample assessment that we recently completed in our clinic.

The average person who comes to Saint Bartholomew for an evaluation will produce a score of around 35%.

The average professional athlete will produce a score of roughly 90%.

This is a massive difference. And it’s in this difference that we find the secret to chronic pain.

I remember one client I had in my first year of practice who came to see me with back pain that was hard to identify. It had plagued him for years and had become quite debilitating.

When I looked at his test results, nearly the entire sheet was red.

Everything had broken down.

I figured if we just started slowly improving each of these systems, he would eventually reach a level where he was functioning so well, that he wouldn’t have anymore back pain.

It worked.

We work with idiopathic pain. Pain of unknown origin. Chronic pain can be tough to pinpoint because, often times, there is no specific incident that caused the first onset of symptoms.

At Saint Bartholomew, we believe that these stubborn pain symptoms are actually a result of a body that has fallen into mediocrity.

The bar for being “physically fit” has simply fallen too low.

Many of our clients report that “I Consistently Go to the Gym.” They consider themselves physically fit. But when we break down their training programs, they are really only pulling one of the four levers.

Having worked in the NBA, I saw first-hand the contrast between someone genuinely trying to maintain a highly-functioning body and the fitness routines of the general public.

The difference is jarring.

You may not have a lot of time to dedicate to the gym. You may be too busy to get to sleep at a reasonable time.

All of that may be true but there are still minimum requirements that you must meet in order to have a healthy body.

Fall short and there will be consequences.

This is the core of everything. This is what everything gets built around.

Ideal posture is means your ribs are perfectly stacked on top of the pelvis.

Great breathing mechanics means 360-degree expansion of the rib cage while maintaining “The Stack.”

We must first identify if your resting posture is in that stacked position and if you’re able to breathe properly.

You are going to take 22,000 breaths every single day. Aside from the beating of your heart, it’s the most foundational muscular movement in the body. If this isn’t functioning properly, nothing else will.

If you’re able to maintain that stack and properly breathe within that position, how resilient are you in maintaining it?

If you are playing basketball and get bumped by your opponent, do you lose the stack or are you able to snap back into it?

If you trip on the sidewalk, do you fall out of position or do you have the resilience to stay aligned.

There are minimum strength requirements to maintaining a pain-free body

Can you hold it for long enough.

If your posture is good and you have the strength to hold it, can you hold it all day long?

It’s very common for our clients to report feeling good when they wake up in the morning but around 2pm, the wheels start to come off.

They simply ran out of gas.

This is an entirely different type of training. We must condition your body to be able to produce long, sustaining energy so that you can hold the proper positions and stay pain-free all day, all week, all month and all year.

When you experience stress, your body’s physical reaction is to extend your spine (arch your back), flare the ribs and tilt the pelvis. It’s an ancient response preparing you for battle.

This effectively pulls you out of “the stack.”

One of the unique qualities of the human brain is that we can produce those stress reactions through thought alone. Of course you know this. Thinking about a deadline at work, financial difficulties or family dynamics can trigger the fight-or-flight response.

The final system of chronic pain that we must evaluate is the body’s nervous system. Are you able to maintain your healthy posture and breathing in the presence of cognitive strain.

Each person that comes through Saint Bartholomew will go through our four systems assessment and receive a score on a scale of 0-100.

This is your chronic pain score.

In our view, a passing score (85+) indicates that you are meeting the bare minimum of what a human being should be able to do.

In addition to these data points, we also assess the nervous system through a 22-question test designed to identify how much strain your nervous system is under. We compare those results to key biometric data points to produce your nervous system score.

Once your assessment is complete, we now follow our Clinical Standards process to systematically restore each one of your systems.

Click Here to Download a Copy of our Clinical Standards

In short, we do not move on to the next systems until the minimums from the previous category have been met.

We believe that chronic pain comes from the degradation of these four systems over time. Our mission is to get your body functioning at such a high level, that we effectively reduce the likelihood of you remaining in pain to nearly zero.

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