Guidebook to Low Back Pain: Diagnosis and Treatment
Don't Live in Torment
By the time patients attend our clinic, they have seen dozens of doctors in search for pain relief. While their biggest interest is to get pain relief, ours to determine if they have an underlying problem(s) that explains not only their pain, but other issues about their body. We do not simply “covering up” pain; we want to “heal” it from the inside.
Patients initially find it hard to trust. Like me, they were told it was “all in your head”, offered anxiety pills, or told they were just having panic attacks. A fair amount of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) exists, and we try to offer a fresh start. That’s why I chose the following quote from Frank Crane and placed it at the front of the book:
You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don’t trust enough.
After recovering from a traumatic brain injury that left me bedridden for twelve years, I assumed the spinal cord injury clinic of Dr. Forest Tennant, MD, Dr. P.H. He reinforced the endocrinology of his workups, and showed me his incredibly comprehensive management style. As an anesthesiologist by training, it was second nature for me to grab hold of the polypharmaceutical approach he offered, one that included supplements and various interventions. It is to Dr. Tennant that I owe all my gratitude and knowledge.
I wrote this guidebook after one year of treating the clinic. I poured in everything I learned, in the hopes that it would help others who spend the majority of their professional careers looking at people’s backs and spines.
Trusting without Opioid Obsession
The first two chapters show that the patients who trust me and follow the protocol are the ones that quickly get better. It requires they dance through some hoops, like being patient, getting extensive labs done, trying different medications, and not giving up on a medication that gives side effects. Instead, they follow our “alternative advice” to cut the dose in half, and try it again. That is because our protocol works.
The ongoings of the “opioid crisis”, which is really an “illicit fentanyl” crisis have harmed chronic pain patients. They cannot obtain a prescription of opioids, and many have been force-weaned without additional therapies offered in their stead. If a patient arrives with a relative obsession of getting opioids, we quickly dispel it by going beyond opioids. In time, we show them that other things can help by healing from the inside, instead of just covering up their pain.
The Professional Patient
I totally remember what it was like to suffer 24/7 without relief. As written in my first few books, my pain was like a red-headed stepchild clamoring for attention, screaming at me with each movement. It was sad that I could not talk about anything but my pain. Every conversation with my family wound back to… my pain. The weather affected my pain, food affected my pain. Heck, even water affected my pain.
In time, I learned that I was making people sick of my pain. It affected my relationships.
I had two choices: either talk about my pain and continue to make people sick of me, or get a professional to talk about my pain. So I went to a psychiatrist who helped me not only handle my pain better, but to persevere beyond my beliefs.
For this, I thank Walter Jacobsen, MD, author of Forgive to Win. His book helped me, and it helped every relationship since then. I highly recommend this book as a new beginning for general qualities in life that help us to be whole. You can check out Dr. Jacobsen’s Facebook Page here and get this book here. It will change your life.
If a patient can learn to be a professional patient, they may accelerate their healing. They understand how doctors think, and answer “yes or no” questions with a “yes” or a “no”. Why? So the doctor can think about the differential diagnosis and go to the left if the answer is yes OR go to the right if the answer is no.
Your doctor’s goal is to go down a list of endless possibilities to get your diagnosis. Let her do her job, because your very diagnosis may be at the end of this rainbow. If your doctor doesn’t suspect your diagnosis during the first visit, it may be that she will never know what you have.
If you can allow your doctor to do her job and utilize your time together so it maximizes your care, you may walk out with a new diagnosis. This could not only change your mindset. It can change everything about your life: your outlook, relationships, sleep, lifestyle and longevity.
Healing
I only know these things because I know pain. And severe disability. More than that, I know about being alone, helpless, and being given up for dead.
How many others did the doctors give up on? If I hadn’t been a doctor, I would have died. As it was, I almost died about 40 times.
In the beginning, even though I had a near death experience (NDE), I was afraid to die and leave my toddler behind without me. That’s when I wrote No More Tears: A Physician-Turned Patient Inspires Recovery. In case I died, I wanted someone to know what I went through, what it was like and what was happening to me. Now in its Revision, last week I painted what I thought could be a new book cover, but of course the publishing company, MainSpring Books, will decide on the final:
I didn’t know how to fight for my diagnosis. That only came years later, when I wrote The Rebel Patient: Fight for Your Diagnosis.
I don’t want to see you go downhill. I want to see you thrive, and every time I look at you and see you standing instead of laying down, I like it. At the end of our medical appointment, it literally makes me happy just to see you walk away from me.
Walking Away
If we can walk away from one another at the end of an appointment, I know two very good things: I am walking, and you are walking.
So keep walking away.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
My Guidebook to Low Back Pain: Diagnosis and Treatment has four parts. This covers Part 1. Thank you to Main Spring Books for accepting my guidebook for Exhibition at the American Library Association Conference and Exhibition, June 23 - 28, 2022. Over 25,000 librarians attended.
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My Guidebook to Low Back Pain: Diagnosis and Treatment: A comprehensive book for chronic pain, especially 24/7 low back pain. Perfect for the general public, doctors, attorneys, and any professional who sees people’s backs: physical therapists. Selected to be on exhibit at the June 2022 American Library Association’s Annual Exhibition and Conference in Washington, DC. See my Amazon book here.
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