Ron,
As a family medicine MD I'll apologize for my colleagues. It is unfortunate that sometimes physicians treat to the "norm" and don't accept that some people may legitimately want to live at a much higher level of fitness than the average American. The suggestion to go to your family doctor, see if he will recommend you to a good PT, and see if the PT can help discern what is going on or if there is an exercise program that would help correct the problem is a good one
That said, I would be curious to hear of your symptoms. When does it hurt, how severe is the pain on a scale of 1-10, what is the location and quality of the pain, dull, burning, aching etc, does it start in the right lower abdomen and shoot into the groin for example, what exacerbates the pain, what makes it better, does it come a a particular time of day etc. If you feel it is from an injury, what happened to the best that you can guess. If you fell for example, how did you fall, how did you land etc. Once you type out your detailed answer, do yourself a favor and print it out and take it with you to your next MD visit. It may help a lot in sorting things out. A good history is 75% of the work in discovering these things.
The MRI may or may not be helpful. Most MD's would want to be sure the test could help sort things out before ordering this expensive test. ie - do I need to know right now or will this self correct. After all, most things tend to sort themselves out (sorry if I'm clueless about something that has been nagging for many months.) MRI can be helpful in answering specific questions...ie) do you have an abdominal muscle strain...so if you get far enough that someone gets a theory of what is happening it is fair to ask the question, 'Would an MRI either prove or disprove that theory, would it help us in any way? And if we get the MRI would it change anything we are going to do? If it doesn't change what you are going to do, why get it?
Lastly, follow up with your MD.....get a follow up visit if you are not happy with the way things are progressing. If you go, try what the MD says and it doesn't help and go back with the same problem, no change, there is a lot more incentive to push a different button to find the answer. Unfortunately, we don't always figure things out on the first wack.....it is a "practice" of medicine.
I hope this helps,
Perry
I will try to check for you answer. Usually Monday - Thursday is a blur, but I can check in on Friday.