For patients · 3 min read
What an athlete should ask before paying for recovery
You are the most valuable customer in this category, and the reasons you are valuable are the same reasons you are easy to sell to.
If you compete at any level, you have already been marketed to by this industry, and you were targeted on purpose. Understanding why is most of the defence.
Why you are the easiest sale in the room
Four things are true of an injured athlete that are not true of an ordinary patient, and every one of them raises what you will pay.
- You are on a clock. A season, a trial, a contract year. Somebody who needs an answer by March will accept an answer that would not survive being thought about until June.
- You are usually paying yourself. No insurer is standing between you and the invoice asking what the evidence is, which means the ordinary friction that slows a bad purchase down is absent.
- You already believe in marginal gains, correctly. Sleep, load management and nutrition genuinely do compound. That belief is well-founded and it transfers, unearned, to whatever is sold next to them.
- You are used to being told that discomfort is the price of progress — which makes you unusually willing to keep paying for something that has not worked yet.
The idea worth more than the rest of this page
Most injuries get better on their own. Not all, and not always fully, but the ordinary course of a soft-tissue injury is improvement over weeks, and the ordinary moment to go looking for an intervention is the week it hurts most.
Put those two facts together and you get the problem that makes this entire category hard to read: you almost always buy at the worst point, and almost anything you buy is followed by improvement. The improvement is real. What is unproven is that the purchase caused it. Statisticians call this regression to the mean, and it is the engine underneath a very large share of the testimonials in this field — including the sincere ones, which is what makes it worth knowing. Nobody is lying to you. They got better, and they are telling you what they were doing at the time.
The question is never whether you improved. It is whether you improved more than you would have anyway.
That is a genuinely hard question and one testimonial cannot answer it. Neither can twenty. It takes a comparison group, and a comparison group is the thing most of this category does not have.
Separate the training question from the product question
A great deal of what is sold as recovery is answering a question that load, sleep and mechanics were already going to answer more cheaply. Before you evaluate an intervention, work out which question you are actually asking: why did this tissue fail under this load, or what can I buy for the tissue that failed. They have different answers and the first one is free.
This is why the clinicians’ shelf on this site now carries a podiatrist who works with track athletes rather than only people who work with our material. Gait, footwear and tendon load are unglamorous and they are where a disproportionate number of recurring lower-limb problems are actually settled.
Four questions for whoever is selling
- Compared with what? Not “does it work” — does it beat rest, load management and time, which are the alternatives you already own.
- Who measured, and were they paid by the outcome? A clinic reporting its own results is not disqualified by that, but you should know it before you weigh them.
- What would make you tell me I am not a candidate? A provider with no version of that sentence has no filter, and you are on the wrong side of it.
- What are you not claiming? Ask it out loud and listen to how prepared the answer is.
Where we stand in this
We supply clinics. We do not sell to individuals and we will not sell to you, so there is nothing at the end of this page for you to buy — which is worth stating because it is the only reason you have to believe the four questions above are for your benefit rather than ours. Ask them of us too. Anyone who supplies this category should be able to answer them, and should be less impressive when they cannot.
If you want the general version of this discipline rather than the athlete’s, it is written up at how to read a clinic’s regenerative claim.
