Disclaimer: I have been working in healthcare for the last 5 years and am currently in school to become a radiographer...

Jim...
The biggest problem with healthcare today is that we have too high of expectations of the knowledge of our medical providers. You would expect a physician to be able to read a radiograph, but the truth is, most physicians suck at it unless they are a radiologist. I worked very closely with a number of Emergency Physicians, and I can tell you that some were pretty good at reading radiology results, but most of them were not really that great, especially when it came to bordeline pathology. If your physician was an ortho specialist then he should have been able to make a reasonably accurate reading, but a GP isn't likely to make an accurate read on something that could be very subtle.

That said, there also is very little understanding by Western Medical practitioners (i.e. MD's) about the relationship between the skeletal and muscular system and how the rest of the body functions. If you tell your MD that your knee hurts, they are going to look at your knee. If they can't find anything wrong, they might recommend surgery or physical therapy. If you go to a DO (Doctor of Osteopathy, a common alternative paradigm that still is accepted in the Western medical philosophy) then they may connect distant muscles or spinal alignment to your pain, but that isn't a guarantee. It all depends on the personal philosophy and beliefs of the physician.

I can tell you from personal experience, however, that a problem in the lower back absolutely can be expressed as pain and even malfunction in the knee. Last winter, out of nowhere, my right knee started clicking loudly and "bumping" every time I went up stairs. I hadn't injured my knee, it just started happening one day. About a week into this I noticed a muscle knot deep in my sacroilliac region so I massaged it as best I could over the course of the next several days (I lost my masseuse when I got divorced ) and when the knot was gone, my knee problem was gone. Now, I know for a fact that I'm not the only person this happens to. Working in the ER it wasn't at all uncommon to have people complain of sudden knee pain with no history of injury. They would come in, get pictures taken, and be discharged without much of a diagnosis because most docs just don't recognize the connection. But it you ever take a moment to stop and look at the musculature of the lower body it's almost a no-brainer... you injure a muscle enough to cause a spasm, it is going to shorten, and when it shortens it pulls against it's insertion point - which is very often the knee!! Of course you're going to pull things out of alignment! The problem is, we put so much faith in our medical system that we literally abjugate our responsibility for our own health. The best doctor I ever had once told me flat out that he couldn't possibly know everything there was to know about a certain issue I was having, and so if I ran across anything on the Internet or in my reading that I thought might be related, to let him know and he'd look into it. Smart man, only physician I've ever known who was willing to admit that to a patient.

Anyway, this is a long way to getting around to what I really wanted to say. Western medicine has it's place in identifying and treating conditions that can lead to known morbidity and mortality. That coveres maybe 5% of what we experience throughout our lives. If there isn't a definitive test or objective sign, then there isn't a heckuva lot they are willing to do for us. It really does fall back on us to figure out whats wrong. I diagnosed my own Celiac disease after a Gastroenterologist told me I had nothing wrong! Of course I had nothing wrong, he did the tests wrong!!! I went to a neurologist for my migraines - he put me on a drug that made me lose association with time within the first 2 days I was on it. For 10 years I suffered debilitating migrains that literally kept me homebound, and nobody could figure out why. It never occurred to ANYONE to connect my GUT to the migraines. As soon as I went of a gluten-free diet I got my life back, and I mean that in all seriousness. I lost a decade of my life, and to say I was disappointed in Western Medicine would be an understatement, although Eastern Medicine didn't help me either. I had to take control of my own health and do the research to figure out what was wrong.

So, lesson learned: when a physician says "there's nothing wrong with you" all they really mean is that whatever is wrong with you probably isn't going to kill you. However, it doesn't mean there's nothing wrong.

Meanwhile, I'm really looking forward to becoming a radiographer. There are still many good things you can do in medicine that really help people have better lives.

MNS