Where is your chronic pain truly coming from?

By: Peter Stamos

When Pain Never Seems to Heal: My Story and What I Learned

If you’re dealing with long-standing injuries that never seem to heal, this is for you.

Over the years, I’ve worked with many people in pain. Some improved quickly. Others didn’t respond the way I hoped. Those “unsolved” cases pushed me to look deeper for better answers—and they’re a big part of why I’m sharing my own story.

From Healthy Athlete to Chronic Pain

I grew up playing a variety of sports and stayed generally healthy. After high school basketball, I tried to continue playing in college. That’s when I ran into real trouble.

I sustained an injury that wouldn’t go away. I stopped playing, saw multiple doctors, and had the usual workup—MRIs, ultrasounds, physical therapy. Nothing clearly explained what was wrong, and nothing created lasting change.

I eventually took almost a full year off to rest. When I finally returned to the court, the same injury came back in a short period of time.

Most of my twenties followed a similar pattern:

• I’d start training or playing sports again.
• I’d get hurt.
• Then new injuries would show up in other areas of my body.

Over time, these issues stacked on top of one another and turned into dysfunction throughout my entire system.

When the Usual Models Don’t Fit

Frustrated, I decided to pursue more education and consult additional medical professionals. Based on how my body was presenting, I knew I wasn’t a simple case.

I didn’t fit neatly into any one model or textbook diagnosis, and that made it harder for people to help me. As I learned more and listened to different experts, I started shifting my focus away from just the injured joints and muscles and toward the structures from the neck up.

I began with my jaw. I worked on my bite and went through Invisalign. That created some improvement, but it didn’t fully resolve the pain or the strange patterns I was feeling throughout my body.

A Clue From Childhood: My Eyes

The next professional I saw was an optometrist.

When I was seven, I’d already had vision problems. My parents took me to an eye doctor because I couldn’t track the baseball being thrown to me. Instead of wearing my glasses consistently, I just switched to larger-target sports like basketball.

Looking back, that choice mattered more than I realized. My vision continued to deteriorate and began to affect how my entire body functioned.

As a kid, I noticed things that didn’t make sense. For example, I couldn’t jump off my left leg at all, so I became a two-footed jumper. As a right-handed athlete, most people naturally jump off their left leg—it’s usually the stronger plant leg for right-handers. No matter how hard I trained or tried to “fix” my left leg, it remained basically useless for jumping.

Finally, an Important Clue

When I finally found the right specialist, I was diagnosed with visual suppression in my left eye and convergence insufficiency.

In simple terms, my two eyes weren’t working together as effectively as they should.

This gave me another piece of information that had been missing from the previous assessments of my movement.

For example, I began noticing relationships between visual tasks and changes in my head position, balance, and movement. When I changed the visual demand, some of those patterns changed as well.

That didn’t mean my eyes explained every injury or movement problem I had experienced. But after years of focusing primarily on muscles and joints, I finally had another factor I could test.

That changed the way I approached my own training—and eventually the way I assessed other people.

No matter how creative or complex my movement drills were, they couldn’t override what my visual system was dictating. I was asking my body to move better without addressing the faulty “software” controlling the movement.

The Bigger Lesson: Look Beyond the Symptom

If you’re stuck in a cycle of recurring pain or movement limitations, it’s natural to focus on the area where you’re experiencing the problem.

But my experience taught me that the area that hurts doesn’t always give us the entire answer.

Vision, jaw function, the vestibular system, previous injuries, mobility, strength, and many other factors can influence how someone moves. Which of those factors actually matters will be different for every person.

In my case, identifying and addressing my visual issues gave me information that years of focusing exclusively on muscles and joints had not.

That’s ultimately the lesson I took from the experience:

Don’t assume you know the cause from the symptom alone. Test, observe what changes, and keep looking until the pieces begin to fit together.

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