Years ago I worked for a sports rehab clinic as a physical therapy aide and massage therapist (I did graduate from a certified massage school!). We had a lot of patients come in with repeat injuries. The physical therapists would take the doctor’s report, set up a treatment plan and when the patient was “better,” or their insurance visits expired, they’d send them out the door. Yet, many of the patients came back weeks or months later - often with the same injuries.

There was an older gentleman who kept coming back. He told me he had this same shoulder and back pain every spring and fall. He supposed it was just part of getting old. I watched him, listened to him and then I noticed his hands.

“What side of the car do you put your golf clubs in?” I asked him.
“How do you know I play golf?” he asked.
“The tan lines on your hand. You wear a golf glove,” I said.
“And, your pain is consistent with a twisting and lifting movement, not enough to come from swinging a club, but it is consistent with lifting and twisting to put a heavy bag of clubs in a car. And, you only have this in the spring and fall, which is when you play golf - since most older men don’t play in the heat of summer.”

He laughed. All the time he’d been seeing a doctor or physical therapist and no one ever mentioned that. People knew he played golf, but didn’t make the connection. I told the Physical Therapist and we agreed - putting his bag, or better yet, having someone else put his bag in the trunk of the car rather than the back seat as he had been (his trunk was too full of other stuff to get the bag in) would improve his pain. He followed our suggestions and his pain never returned.

Other patients came in, often with mysterious ailments. I learned that by talking to them, finding out what an average day was like, what they did, what they liked, what they ate - that eventually the pieces of the puzzle would fall into place and something as simple as a lifestyle change would eliminate their pain. It makes sense, yet so many doctors don’t do that, and don’t see what is really happening in their patient’s lives. Why not?

Last week I went to a new doctor. He didn’t weigh me, or take my temperature, or my blood pressure. He didn’t look in my mouth or check the glands in my neck. He didn’t do a whole lot of anything that had to do with my body. But he listened. We simply talked for an hour about my past medical issues, and my bill, including blood tests, ran to just about $400 - out of pocket. He doesn’t deal with insurance companies and I don’t have any anyway. He clearly wasn’t a people person. He clearly was a problem solver, a man driven to put the pieces together. He likes data, test results and information.

He determined I have a thyroid/adrenal problem, something I’ve suspected for two decades, but could never get a doctor to test for. Doctors like to tell you things are all in your head when they can’t figure out what’s wrong with you. He’ll need more tests, but he’s on the right track.

He was upset that I didn’t have all my medical records and couldn’t remember the names of any of my doctors. I was thinking about that and realized that the reason is because I just don’t remember the names of strangers. My doctors have always been strangers. Like the patients I saw and treated at the clinic, none of my doctors ever knew anything about me. They always breezed into the room, introduced themselves, barked out a diagnosis based on information their nurse collected and then rushed out again. Doctors get paid for treating patients, not for talking to them. I remember his name. I don’t think I’ll ever feel like we’re old friends, but I do think that once he has the tests and we talk, that I’ll remember him. But what does he SEE?

I was thinking about all this today because it occurred to me that solutions to all our problems are there, but not in obvious ways. We don’t see the answer because we’re looking at the symptom, not at the cause. We don’t SEE what the real problem is. The gentleman with the back and shoulder? We treated the pain. No one looked at what could be causing it - because they didn’t think or SEE the entire scope of what it meant to “play golf.” I knew from my own bad back that lifting clubs, particularly the heavy bags that older golfers like to carry, could easily hurt a back. I knew from watching my brother and other golfers that many people put their bags in the back seats of their cars rather than in the trunk - usually because their trunks are full, or aren’t large enough to accommodate a big bag. I knew all this because I watch, I see things. It’s part of what makes me a good story teller - the details.

Years and years ago when I was a security guard for the Denver Broncos training camp part of my job was to keep spectators and friends of the players off of the sidelines during practice. One day I walked over to a group of men, some players, some not, and asked two of the men to leave.

They had arm bands, the same polo shirts and shorts, haircuts, and even the body build to be football players. They wore shoes without socks, and the same sunglasses. To anyone else, they looked like football players.

“How did you know we weren’t players?” one of them asked as we walked off the field.

“Your legs weren’t shaved,” I said.
“All the players shave their legs so the taping doesn’t pull the hair off their legs. You’re not shaved.”

It was a minor detail, but one I’d noticed immediately when I started working with the team. So when unshaved legs appeared, they were obvious - if anyone had been looking.

It’s the small things we see, or don’t see. They often make a big difference. They’re the change in behavior in a child that signals drug use or depression or sexual abuse or bullying. They’re the things at work that let us know layoffs are coming or that we’re going to be fired. They’re the things that let us know a spouse is cheating, or thinking about it. We call it intuition, but all it is is our subconscious noticing things that our conscious does not. What happens if you make a concentrated effort to SEE things around you? Will it make a difference?

If you look at the “park benches” in the photo at the top of this page you’ll notice something different about them. Can you SEE it? The designers were tasked with coming up with a park bench that would deter homeless people. To design what they did, they had to SEE two things that attracted the homeless to park benches. Can you figure out what those two things were?

The two things were warmth and flatness. Homeless people struggle to stay warm and to find a place they can lie down to sleep. With its metal construction, the bench tends to draw heat away from a person - particularly at night. And, the curved surface makes it impossible to lie down on. It’s a homeless deterrent. Great for the designers, bad for the homeless. These benches are in Tokoyo. We haven’t seen them in the U.S. yet. What it tells me is that government SEES the problem, and not the people. Again, what will you see today?