You Don’t Need the Right Words. You Need the True Ones.

People walk into my treatment room and apologize for not knowing anatomy.

They say things like I don’t really know how to describe it or I’m not sure what it’s called and then look at me like they’ve already failed some kind of test they didn’t know they were taking. Sometimes they’ve done the opposite — they’ve googled, they’ve prepared, they arrive with a list of muscle names and a working theory about what’s impinged and why.

I want to tell both of them the same thing: you’re working too hard at the wrong thing.

We don’t have good language for pain in this culture. What we have is a medical register — clinical, diagnostic, requiring professional interpretation — and we have complaint. There’s almost nothing in between. No common vocabulary for just describing sensation as sensation, for conveying the felt experience of living in a body that’s doing something you’d like it to stop doing.

So people reach for the closest available framework. They google their symptoms and arrive speaking in anatomy. Or they minimize — it’s probably nothing, it’s just a little tight — because complaint without diagnosis feels illegitimate. Or they go vague — it just hurts — because they genuinely don’t have words for something more specific and nobody ever told them that more specific was possible.

There’s also a particular pressure that comes with anything that feels even adjacent to medical. People think they need to present themselves professionally. To have the right terminology. To not waste the practitioner’s time with imprecise language.

But here’s the thing: the person who walks in telling me exactly which muscles are involved is often harder to work with than the person who says "it feels like someone parked a hot brick between my shoulder blades and left it there."

Because the anatomical language tells me what someone has been told or what they’ve read. It tells me their working theory about their own body. What it doesn’t tell me is what they’re actually living in — the texture and quality and character of the sensation itself. And that’s what I actually need.

The most useful descriptions I receive are almost never clinical.

They’re metaphorical. They’re sensory. They’re the kind of language you’d use explaining something to a friend over coffee rather than a doctor in an exam room.

Crunchy. Pinchy. Like something that needs to pop but won’t. Hot and stabby. A marble under the skin. Like a wire pulled too tight. Dull and heavy, like a wet sandbag. It catches — right there, when I do this.

That’s the good stuff. That’s the language that actually tells me something about what’s happening in the tissue and the nervous system and the lived experience of being in that body. Texture, temperature, quality of sensation, whether it’s constant or intermittent, whether it moves or stays put, whether it has a sharp edge or a diffuse ache — all of that is infinitely more useful than the name of the muscle you think is involved.

And here’s the thing nobody tells you: you already have this language. You use it for everything else. You describe food this way, you describe physical sensations this way, you reach for metaphor naturally when precise language fails you. You just haven’t been given permission to use it in a clinical or clinical-adjacent context.

Consider this your permission.

There’s another layer worth naming, which is that the pressure to present anatomical knowledge often gets in the way of something more important — actual felt awareness of what’s happening in your own body right now.

I don’t work on individual muscles in isolation. I work on systems, on groups, on the relationships between structures and the patterns those relationships create over time. Knowing that your rhomboids are involved tells me something. Knowing that it feels like something is perpetually bracing, like your body is waiting for an impact that never comes — that tells me more.

The intake process, for me, is less about building a clinical picture and more about understanding where you are and what you need. What are your goals for today. What does better actually look like for you. What have you tried, what has helped, what has made things worse. And what does it feel like — in whatever words come closest to true.

Those words don’t have to be correct. They don’t have to be precise. They don’t have to impress anyone.

They just have to be yours.

If you’re not sure where to start, try this: describe it like you’re explaining it to someone who has never had a body before. Someone who needs to understand not just where it is but what it’s like. Is it sharp or dull. Does it have a temperature. Does it have a texture. Does it move when you move or does it stay in one place. Does it feel like something external — pressure, weight, heat — or something internal, like a tightness or a pulling or a catching.

You might surprise yourself with what you know about your own experience when you stop trying to translate it into terminology and just describe what’s actually there.

That description — imprecise, metaphorical, sometimes a little strange — is the beginning of a conversation between you and your body that a lot of people have never been invited to have.

It’s also, as it turns out, exactly what I need to help you.