When pain or injury is present, the experience is all-consuming and overwhelming and can suck the joy out of life. It’s almost impossible to see a silver lining. 

But it’s always there—we often just need time and space to realise what it is. 

I want to share three of my own challenges with pain over the course of my career, exploring the notion that pain and injury not only shape the way we practise for the better but may end up being the most positive and beneficial experiences of our lives. 

A painful beginning 

We hear countless human stories as physiotherapists but we also have critical life experiences ourselves—for example, a moment in time that pushed us into a career as a healthcare professional. 

For me, this occurred at the age of 17 when I was an aspiring professional footballer. 

I had moved from rural New South Wales to the big smoke to attend a football academy for my final two years of school. 

But the dream in my mind was not matched by my body’s condition. I just wasn’t ready for the intensity of training. 

Due to recurrent ankle sprains and soft tissue injuries over those two years, I spent more time on physiotherapy plinths and in the rehab gym than I ever did on the football field. 

I would return to playing after eight weeks on the sideline, only to be struck down again a few games later—out for another 12 weeks. 

Watching teammates progress while I travelled backwards, never able to make up ground, was soul crushing. 

But had I not experienced the pain and frustration of those injuries at this pivotal point in my life, I might never have ventured into a career as a physiotherapist—one of the best decisions, it turns out, that I could ever have made. 

Compounding experiences 

During the second year of my physiotherapy degree at the University of Sydney, I encountered my second significant pain event. 

A regular morning in the library suddenly turned kaleidoscopic, with flashes here, there and everywhere.

As I turned my head to see what it was, lights and shapes persisted in my periphery. 

My vision became increasingly distorted over the following hour, progressing to a headache with intolerable pain. 

That was the first of many migraines with aura. 

Twelve months of chronic neck pain and migraine resulted in a Tetris-like schedule of study and regular physiotherapy, neurology and imaging appointments. 

In the moment it was torturous and I constantly questioned whether this would be my new norm. 

There was a silver lining but it was awfully opaque at the time. 

I was already a ferociously dedicated student and this experience pushed me hard enough to graduate with a University Medal, the Dean’s Scholar Award and a published academic paper on neck pain (I later published a book on the same topic). 

That dedication to my studies—ultimately a by-product of pain—ended up having a profoundly positive impact on my career. 

I went above and beyond in order to heal myself, which put me in the best possible position to help others avoid and remediate the kind of pain that I endured. 

Expectations and identity 

After a few years in the clear, I sustained a fairly innocuous lumbar disc injury while in the clinic. 

This injury lulled me into false expectations of a two-week recovery timeline but progressed into two years of intense neuropathic radicular pain. Over that period, I saw countless physiotherapists and surgeons and had multiple cortisone injections. 

I spent the majority of my life outside of work trying to rehabilitate myself. 

The process was physically and psychologically exhausting and its allconsuming nature made me question my identity as a physiotherapist. 

I had a persistent, unshakable thought. ‘If I can’t fix my own body, should I really be treating other people?’ 

Drawing on the experience I’d had at university, I became a prolific knowledge seeker. 

I explored pain and injury through a much wider lens in order to deeply understand pain physiology and lifestyle influences on the pain experience (in particular, sleep, stress, nutrition and gut health). 

This gave me exposure to assessment and treatment techniques that would otherwise have taken me a lifetime to discover. 

By cramming a decade’s worth of new knowledge into two years, I was able to not only support my own recovery but also fundamentally change my clinical practice in a way that has helped many others through their own journeys with pain, people I would not have been able to help had I not been through these experiences myself. 

Career-defining lessons 

Beyond developing skills and accumulating knowledge, some of my most defining professional insights have come from being on both sides of the fence. I am a patient and a practitioner. 

One of the clearest lessons has been how difficult long-term adherence to rehabilitation is. 

Most people can follow a treatment plan for a few weeks but when recovery stretches over months or years, consistency and motivation become the real determinants of outcome. It’s a long and lonely journey, with very little support between appointments to keep you on track. 

This challenge is reflected across the industry. 

Up to 70 per cent of physiotherapy patients self-discharge before completing their prescribed treatment (Jack et al 2010) and home exercise program compliance rates are as low as 35–50 per cent (Bassett 2003). 

The consequences are serious—incomplete rehab increases the risk of reinjury, chronic pain and future surgeries. 

A second effect of my experiences with pain has been the widening scope of my ambition to help others. 

My early injuries sparked a drive to support people one-toone as a practitioner. That drive grew into a broader mission—to scale up impact. 

As a clinic owner, I built a team of 25 and have helped more than 20,000 patients in our local community. 

The gap between pain and perspective 

More recently, my focus has expanded again. 

Drawing on what I’ve learned about behaviour change and its role in recovery, I’m now creating apps and AI-supported programs for practitioners and patients that can be used anywhere in the world. 

Would I have pursued this path without my own long stretches of pain? I’m not sure. Pain is a powerful motivator and it pushes you into places you never imagined you’d go. 

Physical pain is one of the hardest human experiences, yet with enough time and distance, it can be one of the most transformative. For me, it reshaped not only my career but also my perspective on what’s possible. 

Perhaps one of life’s most important quests is learning to shorten the gap between pain and perspective and to find meaning faster. 

As health professionals, our role isn’t just to help patients move beyond pain, but to help them see how the pain experience can drive growth, resilience and a deeper understanding of themselves. 

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>>Caelum Trott APAM is a Sydney-based physiotherapist, clinic owner and health-tech founder.