In many cases in sport and exercise medicine, physical assessment is aimed at establishing a structural diagnosis to guide an effective treatment plan in the hope that someone will fully recover. The expert clinician appreciates pain as a protective output, maintains a level of vigilance for when it is necessary to take a broader approach, assesses the various contributors to the patient's pain and considers secondary factors that may act to modulate it at the peripheral and/or central levels.
This approach, which incorporates advances in pain science, will mean fewer patients are given inappropriate treatment that is missing an important element of their condition.