Most of these overlap. Back pain, leg pain and a stiff neck can each come from more than one structure, and the examination exists to separate them rather than to confirm whatever you arrived thinking it was.
Almost everyone arrives describing one of three things: an ache in the back, pain running into a limb, or a neck that will not turn. Each of those has several possible sources behind it, and which one it turns out to be changes what actually helps.
Timing and position do most of the sorting, long before anything is touched. Pain that eases once you are moving behaves differently from pain that only arrives after standing for a while, and pain stopping above the knee is a different question entirely from pain reaching the foot.
So the pages below are organised by what people actually describe rather than by diagnosis, because a symptom is what you arrive with. Where testing points away from us you get told that, which is covered under red flag symptoms, referrals and safety.
Toronto examination
The route
From a symptom to a Toronto plan
Describe it
Where it sits, what aggravates it, how long it has run. You do not need to name the condition to be seen.
Test it
Movement compared side to side, the tissues that reproduce it, and nerve testing where anything travels.
Name it plainly
What the testing showed, in words, including anything that points somewhere other than here.
Agree one step
Something to start, work for the days between, and the visit at which this gets measured again.
Conditions
The conditions with their own page
Each page covers what the presentation usually turns out to be, what imitates it, and what changes the answer.
What people ask before booking, when they are not yet sure the problem is the sort we handle.
That is the normal situation and it is what the examination is for. Describe where it sits, what makes it worse quickly, and how long it has gone on, and the testing narrows it from there.
We assess everything on it. Some presentations turn out to belong with a doctor or another profession, and in that case you leave with a recommendation rather than a plan.
Often, and that is part of why testing matters. A stiff neck and a headache frequently share a cause, while two separate complaints can also run at once without being related at all.
Ordinary mechanical back pain, by a wide margin, and most of it improves inside a few weeks whatever is done. The pages say so rather than implying every ache needs a course of care.
Ring and describe them. The list covers what people most often arrive with, not the limit of what gets assessed, and the honest answer may still be that it belongs elsewhere.
Usually at the first appointment, because history and testing answer most of it. Where something needs imaging or another opinion first, that gets said on the day rather than worked around.
