40

final chapter

seeing things a whole new way

DOROTHY

It’s one of the most famous moments in movie history.

After viewing Dorothy Gale’s dreary Kansas world only in stark black and white and surviving with her the horrible twister that lifted her house off its moorings, we get the reward, the big reveal. The house crashes to the ground, on top of that nasty, stripe-socked Wicked Witch of the East. And Dorothy, having been knocked unconscious by a loose window, awakens to stillness. Gone is the howling terror of the tornado; in its place, a surreal calm.

Dorothy gets out of bed. With her dog, Toto, securely under her arm, she grabs her basket and walks, wide-eyed, to the back door, and throws it open. What she sees changed Hollywood forever: Technicolor (Figure 40-1).

Not just color, but the vivid Technicolor of a wild imagination that creates an impossibly vibrant world. As she enters Oz, Dorothy experiences a world beyond her imagination, so much more than the grim landscape of her home, no matter how much she later yearns to return there. Dorothy has been changed forever, thanks to the sights that she will never forget.^{VID 2}

SURVIVING THE TORNADO

So, too, has the medical world been altered by the ideas and images that precede this final chapter. Old ways have been left behind in a heap, the way we discarded previous thoughts about the sun’s orbiting the earth and New Coke. No more shall the medical community even think to call a core injury a “sports hernia,” just as no one should ever talk about personal organizers, dial-up modems, or Caddyshack II.

Gone are the “old eyes,” which had us looking at the body’s core in olden ways and treating injuries with methods practically akin to medieval barbers’ using leeches to bleed impurities from unfortunate villagers. It’s no longer enough to lump all core muscle injuries into one steaming pile or to ignore the impact of a weakened engine room on the rest of the body. Those days are gone. Long gone. (See Figures 40-2 and 40-3.)

That doesn’t mean there still aren’t troglodytes hiding in caves and refusing to look at the new world. They still use terms like sports hernia to describe core injuries, sounding about as intelligent as 70-somethings talking about the “Internet machine” or that “newfangled rap music.” We can try to bury them. But if we can’t, let them stay in the dark, although their continued use of old eyes has sometimes-catastrophic impacts on their patients (Figure 40-4).

Related posts:

Putting It All Together—A Patient’s Perspective on the Core How the Core Universe Forms The Eureka Moment for the Core The Other Muscles—Hip and Core Stability Biomechanics Presenting…the Core!

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