Acknowledgement

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
—Isaac Newton

All my teachers, throughout the years, have been these giants for me. Thanks a million miles to all of you. Thank you Ira Leinonen and Jamie Skelly for showing me how overrated educational degrees are. I learnt more about movement, strength training and rehabilitation from you two than anyone else.

Below are names of other professional colleagues whom I very highly respect in medical fraternity. They have knowingly or unknowingly contributed towards my learnings of the subject.

Prof. Steven N. Blair, Dr Karim Khan, Dr P. S. Chandran, Prof. Stuart McGill, Prof. Timothy Noakes, Peter Halen, Dr B. K. Singh, Dr B. K. Rao, Dr Harsh Mahajan, Dr Raju Eshwaran, Dr Pankaj Surange, Dr Thomas Kishen, Dr Sanjay Dhawan, and my good friends, Dr Vikram Kumar and Dr Anurag Mishra.

‘If you want to master something, teach it.’ This old adage helped me immensely while I trained my team from scratch rather than expecting them to know it all from before. Most of the times, there was a lot of unlearning for them to do. Teaching them the basics made me question the obvious again and again, which otherwise is overlooked. All my team members have directly or indirectly contributed to this book. They also made me realize that I had become more of a student of pain for life rather than a master.

Below are names of colleagues, in no particular order, for all their contributions. If I have forgotten anyone, I apologize. You know who you are. I sincerely appreciate all your contributions:

Vishwanathan Sridharan, Kunal Vashist, Karishma Rathore, Ritika Chawla, Gagandeep Kaur, Sonam Taneja, Sunil Dahiya, Kishan Pesswani, Neha Kumar, Nimrat Kaur, Sumanth Kumar, Anuvrat Singh, Shibani James, Ishan Arora, Samridhi Saxena, Anika Kaur, Dipali Dhamija, Sumit Arora, Vidhushi Wadehra, Munesh Kumar, Nandlal Pathak, Garima Chawla, Anjeline Dhaka, Krishna Prem, Debapriya Kapoor, Preeti Ashok, Sahrika Sankla, Anita Mathews, Princey, Magesh Kumar, Shahbaz Nawaz, Sudeep Gurang and Kieran Lowe.

Thank you Supreet J. Bargi for doing the photoshoot at such a short notice for the exercises. Thank you Ritika Chawla for agreeing to model, and Karishma Rathore, Vishwanathan Sridharan, Kunal Vashist and Gagandeep Kaur for all the logistics involved in making it happen. Thank you Catherine Withers for helping with editing my random thoughts and giving them shape. Thank you Saloni Mital for making sense out of it all. A special thanks to Shahnaz Singaporia for proposing this idea and helping me build the skeletal structure.

My brats Viren and Harsheath showed me that pain is simply fun. Befriend it and get on with life. Apologies to you both and your mom and my wife, Nidhi, for spending a lot of time on this ‘Taj Mahal of a book’, which should have come out three years ago.

I get too emotionally involved with my patients’ condition. At times it drains me, particularly when their pain doesn’t improve. Thank you so much dad for encouraging me to stay the way I’ve always been because, as you say, that’s what makes me unique. My mother has been my rock through thick and thin, and I can’t thank her enough.