The Great North Logistical Headache - Editorial - MSKMag Issue 34

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit mskmag.substack.com Here in the North East of England, we are emerging from Great North Run season. Hosting the biggest half marathon in the world on our doorstep naturally creates a few more new patient appointments and a little less space on the path of your regular running route. I have done the Great North Run once, two years ago. This was also my final time doing the Great North Run, mostly because of the associated Great North Logistical Headache. Do not let me put you off - it is a fantastic event with a great atmosphere and tens of thousands of runners in turn raising hundreds of thousands of pounds for charity. However, in my experience, the Great North Run is one (very demanding) thing. The Great North Portaloo Queue is quite another. Same too the Great North Return Bus Journey, or, if unlike me, you haven’t seriously pissed off your IT band and fancy it, the Great North Walk to South Shields Metro Station, followed by the Great North Standing Room Only Trip Back to Newcastle in the shadow of a fellow runner’s Great North Armpit. Now I understand that an A to B half marathon route is naturally going to place you 13.1 miles away from where you started but unfortunately what I didn’t reckon with was standing for an hour in the pouring rain in the 2024 starting pen, then an arduous 21 kilometres, THEN boarding what turned out to be Harry Potter’s Knight Bus, realised namely when we were practically scaling the walls of tunnels at speed and then hammered home when I threw up some electrolytes I would rather have kept to myself into my hastily-emptied goodie bag. Despite the best efforts of Ernie Prang and Stan Shunpike, this journey took the same 2 hour 22 minute duration that it took me to go the opposite direction on foot. I mention the half marathon only briefly on purpose because it was eclipsed by the logistics of the day. You deserve a medal for braving the whole day start to finish. You deserve a new technical T-shirt for making it back home, plus or minus some bodily fluids. In this month’s MSKMag, our articles talk about the smallness of a singular appointment and the patient’s label such as ‘runner’ or ‘tight scar’, the pelvic floor that has placed you back at the end of the aforementioned Great North Portaloo Queue, but that no one taught you about, how we can run small business hustles alongside our full time jobs and family lives, and the breadth and depth of how to seek or provide a good second opinion when that singular appointment isn’t going to plan. ‘*It always struck me as bizarre that sports medicine and musculoskeletal specialties deal with pain and dysfunction from head to toe in the human body*’ opens **Grainne Donnelly**, ‘*yet offer little health literacy or inclusion of the pelvic floor*.’ In her piece ‘Healthcare’s best-kept secret - the pelvic floor’, Grainne addresses the much-neglected anatomy that feels forgotten in the big event. **Jonathan Bell and Claire Robertson** team up to write ‘First-Rate Second Opinions’ and share how to both ask for and provide a good one. Can we follow the thread far enough back to tell why a race isn’t going to plan? In ‘Scar Scepticism’, **Hannah Poulton** takes on the evidence to address whether there is merit in soft tissue therapy for the treatment of scars. In an area where clinicians tend to be firmly based on one side of the argument or the other, Hannah will stretch your brain wider than the Felling Bypass to see the bigger picture. In an article that fits my metaphor better than most, **Aidan O’Flaherty** shares what he has learned from treating runners and teaching other clinicians in his running injuries course. It’s not just about the ITB or the Achilles but getting into the runner psyche of the human being wedged into the trainers. Read more in ‘Running Injury Rehab: The Diagnosis Is Only Part of the Story’. And finally, our very own **Jack March** is well known for his main events - Ops Lead at Physio Matters and organiser of Therapy Live and our Masterclasses - but what about the working parts in the background that contribute to his additional business, Rheumatology.Physio. Incorporating some relationship as well as business advice, check it out in ‘Every Day I’m Hustlin’’. And so as medals are hung up and training cycles are wound down, it’s clear that the finish line was never the full story - it was about the training, the effort and the getting home again. It’s the same in the clinic room and this month’s authors are all asking the same question in different postcodes: what’s going on beyond the small picture: the singular appointment, the singular label and the singular diagnosis? Medals are brilliant but the bigger picture is where the good stories lie.