How does a PT who understands pain react to an “injury” while working out? part 4

I’ll answer some of the questions I posed from my personal low back “injury” story while deadlifting.
Why didn’t you get an X-Ray? MRI? Or go to an ER?
X-rays are great for when there is a big trauma to the body, like getting hit by a car, and you want to get a quick view of any fractures (broken bones). I didn’t have a big trauma, so it’s very unlikely I had a serious fracture in my spine. My spine is strong, my spine is solid ,and it has evolved to be able to handle a beating for a lifetime. It’s unlikely that my spine would just crumble and break with a weight I usually lift and have done recently (fun side note, we can find non-traumatic stress fractures in patients without any complaints of pain, so to fit the theme here, even a broken bone doesn’t ALWAYS cause pain).
MRIS are great for seeing all the tissues in your body but MRIs are a fairly new technology. They’ve only been around for about 40 years. Without knowing anything else, It makes sense that if someone is in pain and the MRI shows a herniated disc or arthritis, that we can attribute the cause of the pain to be that herniated disc or arthritis. Thats what we thought and thats what many people, even medical professionals, still believe now… I wish we were that simple. It would be easy to explain, and then you can just repair that deformity and be done with it. But it’s not that simple. We also see herniated discs and arthritis in the spines of people without any pain at all. So they have visible tissue damage in an MRI and NO PAIN. If I did get an MRI and it did find a herniated disc, there would be no way to know whether I had that herniated disc before I started feeling pain. It wouldn’t change how I treated my own low back pain. Also I don’t have any clinical “red flags” I mentioned before. MRIs are amazing and they are useful in a lot of situations, just not in my situation.
The ER is really great at keeping you alive but not so great at treating low back pain. If I would’ve went to the ER they would probably have made me get all these unnecessary tests I just talked about (MRI and/or X-Ray), they would’ve given me some drugs to hold me over and told me to go see a specialist after being there for 8 hours. They don’t have the time or the training to deal with that and they shouldn’t since that’s not the best use of their time. That’s not what the ER is there for. Low back pain is rarely an emergency.

If anything doesn’t make sense or if something sounds like bullshit, call me out on it, question it.

Disclaimer: This is not medical advice. This just applies to me at this time in this current situation.