Where It Hurts

Bob Harlan has spent forty-two years fixing other people's backs. Six months from retirement, a respected physiotherapist on Harley Street, he can't fix his own.

He knows exactly what's wrong: a narrow spinal canal he's had since birth. That certainty is the problem. Because he already knows the answer, he has stopped asking questions.

Where It Hurts follows Bob through his last year in practice and his first year out of it. Along the way are a surgeon who jokes to keep his grief at bay, a young physiotherapist hugely motivated by pain science, and the practice manager who has quietly watched the whole clinic for eleven years. Through their patients (a shoulder that turns out to be a gallbladder, a knee that's really a hip, a scaffolder with three weeks to get back up a building) Bob relearns what he has taught all his life. Pain rarely has one cause, and the most dangerous moment in any assessment is when you think you already know.

Written by a physiotherapist with more than thirty years in clinical practice, it is a novel about the body and the life it carries. Each chapter is matched by plain-English notes at the back: what was happening in the body, what to consider, and when to get help.

For anyone living with pain who wants to understand it better. For physiotherapists, students and clinicians who want to think more widely about the people in front of them. And for anyone who has ever stopped asking questions of themselves.

Andrew Jackson is a Chartered Physiotherapist and a member of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, practising in central London. He holds a BSc in Sports Science, an MSc in Exercise Physiology and an MSc in Physiotherapy, and is a CHEK Level 4 Practitioner. He has worked in rehabilitation, pain, sport, health and exercise for more than thirty years, alongside medical care.

Andrew works with patients at both ends of the spectrum: complicated cases that others are reluctant to take on, and athletes who demand great attention to detail. His approach draws on techniques and methods from his extensive study of pain neuroscience, osteopathy, C.H.E.K, physiotherapy, clinical anatomy, sports science, neuromuscular therapy, neurodevelopmental approaches, yoga and many related disciplines. He believes in a bespoke, clinical approach, and that healing and recovery from pain and injury happen when patients feel comfortable, relaxed and at ease.

Andrew also created The Body Navigator, a privately curated, AI-based clinical decision-support resource for physiotherapists and other health professionals.

Where It Hurts is his first novel.

www.andrewjacksonphysiotherapy.com
www.thebodynavigator.com
andrew@andrewjacksonphysiotherapy.com