When “Not Yet” Becomes an Emergency

Dr. Tanya Westerbeek regularly meets people who have lived with discomfort, exhaustion or physical limitations for years before seeking help. They aren’t lazy, careless or unwilling to take care of themselves. They’ve been doing the quiet math of whether the problem is serious enough to interrupt work, family responsibilities, their paycheck and their routine.

Whether they spend the day repeating the same movement on a production line or sitting in the same position behind a screen, their bodies gradually adapt to one shape. The change rarely feels dramatic—until “not yet” becomes an emergency.

Tanya explains why healthcare should meet people without judgment, wherever they are in that process. Patients don’t need another lecture about waiting too long. They need a place where they can finally say something is wrong—even if they still believe it’s probably nothing.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:06

I want to tell you about a question I ask every single day. Somebody's sitting in front of me, they're not in crisis, they're just worn down, tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix. And somewhere in the conversation, I ask the question I always ask, how long has this been going on? And they look up the ceiling, you can see them doing the math in their head, and they say something like, I don't know, a couple of years. A couple of years. And I want to be really, really clear about something because I think it matters. These people that I'm talking to, they aren't lazy. They aren't in denial. They are not the people that just don't take care of themselves. That's not who they these people are. They've just never had a good enough reason to walk through the door that they've never walked through before. So a few years ago, I started paying closer attention to who was actually showing up in my office and more importantly, who wasn't. And a pattern showed up. I had patients who worked on a line, same motion, same side, same angle, eight, ten, twelve hours a day, reaching, lifting, twisting to the right, never to the left. Their body was doing one thing a thousand times for years. Thousand times a day for years. I also have patients that never move at all. Desk, screen, chair, shoulders rolled forward, head drifting towards the monitor, hips folded at 90 degrees from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Two completely opposite jobs, same result. A body that got very, very good at one shape. And what I noticed clinically, this is my observation in a chair over a lot of years, is that these bodies rarely broke down suddenly. It was always slow, it was cumulative. So I started asking, not clinically, but just as a person who's curious. Why now? What took two years? And almost nobody said I didn't think it mattered. What they actually said sounded more like I didn't want to make a big deal about it, or everybody at work deals with this, they just push through it. Or my favorite because I hear it constantly, I figured it would just go away. None of that is a character flaw. It's math, it's quiet math that people do without realizing they're doing it. Is this bad enough yet to interrupt my day, my paycheck, my routine, to go and sit in a waiting room and explain myself to a stranger? For most people, the answer stays not yet for a really long time. Sometimes for years. Sometimes until not yet, becomes now it's an emergency. We wait until it's an emergency. And here's the thing that no one says aloud. It's not because people don't care about their bodies, it's because nobody ever made it easy. Nobody met them where they actually were. On the line, at a desk, exhausted, skeptical, and not looking for a lecture. So that's the thing I started building my whole approach around. Not come see me when it's bad enough. Just come as you are. Whenever you're ready. I'll meet you there. That might mean you show up on your lunch break in your uniform 15 minutes before you have to clock back in. That might mean you've never said the word chiropractor out loud to anyone in your life and you feel silly walking through our door. It also might mean you've been telling yourself it's probably nothing for so long that you don't even believe yourself anymore. None of that disqualifies you. None of that means you've waited too long or done it wrong. The people I see who've been carrying something for two years, they weren't unwilling. They were never unwilling. They were just never met. And the thing that still gets me, the thing I don't take for granted, is that people let me in at that moment when they finally decide to say something. That moment is small and it doesn't always feel like, and it doesn't feel like anything. It's usually kind of embarrassed and apologetic and hedged with it's probably nothing. But it's the moment that everything changes. So if you've got a thing that you've been carrying for two years, you don't have to solve it in this week. You don't have to be ready. You just have to be willing to meet me where you are. That's it. That's all any of us ever needed. So I'll see you next time.