Description
Being a contrarian on social media is the EASIEST lane there is.
Take decades of hard-earned clinical reasoning and observation…
strip away all context…
flatten everything into black or white…
then call it "stupid, made-up PT bullshit"
Congrats!
You sound smart to people who don’t know any better or coach real humans in pain!
YAY!
This drives me crazy.
Pelvic position, or lack thereof (in this case) CAN matter.
Not for everyone.
Not all the time.
But absolutely for some people, in some contexts.
What do they want to do?
Where are their individual movement constraints?
What movements/positions/skills keep flaring symptoms?
Is the pelvic position (or lack of) feeding the problem…
or is it just an incidental finding?
That’s the work.
And it’s messy.
It reeks of ambiguity and nuance...
It doesn’t fit cleanly into a double-blind placebo-controlled box.
Research is forced to isolate variables that DON'T EXIST IN ISOLATION.
You can measure pelvic tilt angles.
You can measure pain scores.
What you can’t easily measure is the story, the goals, the demands, the history, the adaptations, and how all of that interacts in a real human being...
So when someone says “this doesn’t matter at all,”
what they’re really saying is...
“I don’t deal in nuance.”
Or worse…
“I don’t coach enough people to see when this actually matters..”
Giants in our field figured out a lot of important things without 30 sec Instagram soundbites or perfect RCTs.
Dismissing that work doesn’t make you above it.
Passing it off as meaningless is as harmful as the complexity you claim is.
Pelvic position isn’t definitive of anything.
It also isn’t completely irrelevant.
It’s information…
and like all information, it only has value when you understand the context.
If you don’t want to do that thinking, just say so.
I gladly will.
TLDR: Static pelvic tilt doesn’t predict pain, but pelvic orientation clearly influences movement strategies and loading patterns... which can.
Context matters.
Refs:
Bauer CM, Gruber K. (2017). PMID: 28411033
Increased lumbar lordosis and pelvic tilt during gait: adaptations or compensations?