The Difference Between Fixing and Healing (And Why It Changes Everything About Your Health)

The Difference Between Fixing and Healing

With an influx of new members in our practice, I wanted to return to a topic that underpins a huge part of what NetworkSpinal care is philosophically based in. It sits quite distinct from allopathic (mainstream) healthcare. Although it has it’s place in crisis-care, knowing this distinction can illuminate a lot about where the mainstream paradigm falls short, and brings to question what you may have believed for a long time.

Most people come into a practice like ours wanting to get rid of something.

Usually pain. Or tension. Or a pattern of symptoms they've been managing for quite a long time. There’s no doubt that pain can be a powerful motivator and "make this stop" is a reasonable thing to want.

What gets people stuck isn't wanting the pain gone. It's that most care stops there — returning the body to exactly the state it was in before the symptom showed up. Even just saying that, can you begin to see where a dilemma may arise?

Two different goals, two different models

Most healthcare operates inside what's called a “restorative” model. The framework, whether it's a GP, a physio or even some alternative modalities, is roughly the same: something has gone wrong, the job is to correct it, and success looks like getting the person back to where they were before the problem started.

That works for a lot of things. A broken bone needs to be set. An infection needs to be treated. There are absolutely situations where restoration is the right call.

But for the kind of chronic, recurring patterns that bring most people through our door, it tends to fall short. Because returning someone to a prior state also returns them to the state that produced the problem in the first place. The symptom goes away. The conditions that generated it stay. A few months later, they're back or it’s back.

"Reorganisational healing” operates on a different premise entirely. The goal isn't to get you back to where you were. It's to move the system forward to somewhere it's never been, with more capacity, more adaptability and a different relationship to symptoms and stress than it had before. Does this sound like new territory for you?

Treating the problem versus removing the lid

One way to think about it: a symptom is the body's way of reporting on what's been happening underneath for a long time. Pain, tension, fatigue, persistent anxiety, recurring digestive issues. These aren't random. They're all intelligent responses and signals from a system that has been adapting to stress, compression, old injuries and accumulated life experience, and has finally run out of room to compensate quietly.

The restorative model looks at that signal and asks "how do we turn it off?" Which is understandable. A symptom is uncomfortable and interrupts your life. That's actually part of its purpose. Remember what I say? The purpose of pain is to interrupt your life! But suppressing the signal without addressing what's generating it is a bit like turning off a smoke alarm while the fire's still going.

Reorganisational healing asks a different question. Not "how do we get rid of this?" but "what is this pointing at, and what would the system need to function differently?" The symptom stops being the problem to solve and becomes an entry point into understanding how the whole system is organised.

The distinction is this: fixing aims to remove or suppress. Healing aims to develop or express.

Why going back isn't always the goal

There's a sentence from the framework we practice in that stays with us: treating is going back to a prior state. Healing is moving to a higher one.

Most people haven't consciously considered that distinction, but they recognise it when they sit with it. Because some of them already know, somewhere, that the version of themselves they're trying to return to wasn't actually working that well. The back pain started before the obvious stressor did. The tension in their shoulders was there before the crisis. They were already running on fumes before everything fell apart.

The body didn't break when the symptom appeared. It had been quietly adapting for years, and the symptom was just the point where adaptation ran out of options.

This is crucial to be aware of because it changes what success looks like. Success in a restorative model is absence of the problem. Success in a reorganisational model is a person who functions differently than they did before they started, not just someone whose scan looks clean or whose pain has temporarily settled.

What that looks like in practice

People who've been through enough care here often say something similar. Often people stop noticing whether the original complaint has gone away, because that question becomes less interesting than what else is changing. They may suddenly remember that their knee used to hurt but isn’t anymore and they’re already using it differently. 

Sleep improving when sleep wasn't the presenting issue. Recovering from difficult situations faster. Noticing stress building before it overwhelms them rather than after. Finding that patterns they'd assumed were just personality traits, being reactive, struggling to switch off, taking things personally, holding tension through the jaw and the chest constantly, can start loosening without anyone directly targeting them.

That's not coincidence. When the nervous system reorganises to a higher level of function, the downstream effects tend to spread across everything. The system that runs everything just has more bandwidth that it did before.

The part that can feel uncomfortable

NetworkSpinal care (part of Reorganisational Healing) sometimes produces a temporary period of instability before things settle into something better. Old patterns surface. Emotions that were compressed under years of tension find a bit of room to move. Symptoms that had been muted start to be felt more clearly before they resolve. That’s a common one.

This is not the care making things worse. This is not you going backwards. It’s the system accessing energy that was previously bound up in holding patterns, and using it to reorganise. Most people get to this point and, if they understand what's happening, find it more interesting than alarming. The body isn't deteriorating. It's doing something it hasn't had enough energy to do for a long time: feel.

In a purely restorative model, this kind of instability would signal failure. Here, it's often the clearest sign that something real is shifting.

Final thought

If you've been getting the same problem fixed repeatedly and it keeps returning, it's worth asking whether the goal has been set at the right level.

Getting rid of pain is a reasonable short-term aim. But if the system that produced the pain doesn't change, the pain is going to come back, or find another way to express the same underlying pattern. Fixing the symptom without changing the system isn't failure on the part of the practitioner. It's just what trying to restore someone to a prior minimal state produces.

The question worth sitting with is this: do you want to get back to where you were, or somewhere better than you've been?

Those are different destinations, and they require a different kind of approach.

Know someone who keeps getting the same thing fixed and it never quite sticks? Send them this. Or better yet, bring them in.