Healing A Bad Back--An Effort in Painful Futility? 6 comments

10 Feb 2004 @ 16:05, by Bruce Kodish Yesterday's New York Times (Feb. 9, 2004) published a long article by Gina Kolata entitled, "Healing a Bad Back Is Often an Effort in Painful Futility." Link The article gives a pretty good rundown of some of the facts familiar to knowledgable health-care providers: Alot of money and effort gets spent with very questionable return on investment. As the article puts it, "...for all the costs, for all the hours spent in doctors' offices and operating suites, for all the massage therapy and acupuncture and spinal manipulations, study after study is leading medical experts to ask what, if anything, is doing any good..." The report goes on to note that most people get better without treatment (not quite the positive news you might think--since "better" doesn't necessarily mean "pain-free"). The article also notes that for those who don't get better, the best approach (according the experts quoted) may be to learn live with the pain. What a depressing conclusion...even more so because the article and the experts it quotes fail to give an adequate picture of the problem and thus encourage an unnecessary fatalism about the possibilities of healing. In my book, Back Pain Solutions (available for free from my website: www.backpainsolutions.net) I survey much of the evidence presented in Kolata's article and present another way of looking at the research findings. See in particular my Chapter 2-Back Pain Problems There are possibilities that the conventional wisdom of the medical community has neglected. The book has been reviewed in Physical Therapy, the peer-reviewed journal of the American Physical Therapy Association. I also sent review copies of the book to a number of well-respected experts in physical medicine and physical therapy. As yet no one has refuted my criticism of back pain research, how it gets interpreted, and the resulting leap into futility reported in the NY Times article. I invite weblog readers to read Chapter 2 and to give me their comments.What kind of results have you found in dealing with back pain and other related problems? Have you discovered some ways to get beyond the fatalism? Remember, statistical research only goes so far. It does not cover the particularities of any individual. And what one individual finds may have relevance for others. Fatalism and futility are not necessary.

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