The practice, and why it still works this way.

One-on-one isn’t a slogan here. It’s the only way a root-cause evaluation stays useful past the first visit. The doctor who finds the actual reason for your pain is the same doctor treating you at visit two, and visit six, because that reasoning doesn’t transfer well between three different aides taking notes on three different clipboards.

If you’re reading an about page before booking anything, you’re not being difficult. You want to know who’s actually going to put hands on you, and that’s a reasonable thing to want from a doctor. It’s the same instinct Dr. William Ott had on the other side of the table, which is most of the reason this model exists at all.

Skip the root-cause step and pain has a habit of finding its way back to the exact place you left it: the shoulder that behaves right up until the weekend you finally reach overhead for real, the back that holds up until the move, the trip, the yard work you’d been putting off. A plan with an endpoint only works if somebody actually found the endpoint first.

Every plan that comes out of that evaluation moves through the same four phases, Pain, Prime, Perform, Prevent, in that order, whether the diagnosis is a stiff shoulder or a knee six weeks post-op. The phases don’t change. The specifics inside them do.