Self-diagnosis

Earlier in the week I woke up and felt a lot of tightness around my neck. As the day progressed the pain was getting worse and worse and by the end of the day I could hardly turn my neck. I assumed that I had pulled a muscle and proceeded to take some Advil and ice the area. I remember saying to my mother - whom I was visiting at the time - "you can't go wrong with ice." Little did I know how wrong I was!

To make a long story short, turns out that I didn't have a pulled muscle. I had a pinched nerve around the collarbone area. And I learned that you don't want to ice the area right next to the neck because you can freeze some of the nerves there and create some major damage.

This incident reminded me how often self-diagnosis leads to inaccurate conclusions. Not only does this not solve the original problem, but it makes it worse. On the other hand, it also reminded me of the importance of having expert resources available to help us properly diagnose situations and treat them appropriately.