End Back Pain Forever: A Groundbreaking Approach to Eliminate Your Suffering - Softcover

Marcus, Norman J.

 
9781439167441: End Back Pain Forever: A Groundbreaking Approach to Eliminate Your Suffering
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1439167443 ISBN 13: 9781439167441
Verlag: Atria, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

From a leading pain management expert, a revolutionary book about ending back pain—the #1 cause of debilitating pain in people under age forty—through treatment of muscles and tendons, rather than through medication or surgeries.

If you or someone you love has been suffering with back pain, this book could change your life.

Americans spend more and more each year treating neck and back pain—over $86 billion annually—but all too often, the treatments simply don’t help. Why keep taking medicine if it doesn’t work? And why resort to painful, unnecessary surgery or injections if there’s a better remedy? End Back Pain Forever is a revolutionary guide that shows you the many ways that back pain can be produced and the easy-to-follow steps you can take to eliminate it.

Norman Marcus, one of the nation’s leading back pain specialists, estimates that more than 75 percent of back pain cases can be cured by treating the muscles rather than through surgery or drugs. Yet too many doctors don’t recognize this, leaving patients struggling for solutions. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Marcus will show you:

• Why the current standard for diagnosing and treating back pain is flawed.

• Why high-tech imaging tests are not useful in diagnosing most back pain.

• Techniques that can protect you from injury.

• Twenty-one simple exercises that can end your back pain forever.

• How aging and pregnancy affect your back.

• And much more.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. Norman J. Marcus is the director of muscle pain research at NYU School of Medicine and a former president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine. He has been named one of the “Best Doctors in New York” by Castle Connolly for more than ten years. He lives with his wife Suzy in New York City.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

End Back Pain Forever
 

CHAPTER 1

“Doctor, My Back Is Killing Me!”

You feel a twitch in your low back, then a heaviness and a sudden stab of pain. It strikes without warning: when you are crossing the street, stacking the dishwasher, jogging, whacking a golf ball, lifting a baby, swatting a fly, carrying groceries, bending over, getting out of a car, or just turning on a faucet.

Now you’re afraid to move. You’re locked in place. You feel a belt of pain pulsing across your back from hip to hip. You wonder, “What’s happening? What did I do to get this?” You feel as though you’re cut in half, as the pain seems to separate you from your legs. “Will the pain go away? Will it stay?” Gingerly, you start to move, but the pain only strikes harder. No, it’s not going away, not at all. And if—this is a big “if”—the pain does ease off in a few days or go away in a couple of weeks, studies show that over time, it is certain to return in close to 50 percent of patients.

Back pain can be your personal bully. It can readily become chronic, lasting for months, years, even a lifetime. It may become so intense and disabling that your life can change dramatically for the worse. It can strip you bare financially, isolate you from family and friends, and leave you anxious and depressed. It can banish even the mere thought of sex. The curious thing about pain is that the more you think about it, the worse it becomes. Preoccupied with your pain, you lose interest in hobbies and sports. Your decreased activity may lead to obesity, which, in turn, can increase your chances of developing diabetes and heart disease. You watch in despair as you decline physically, mentally, and spiritually.

This book means exactly what the title End Back Pain Forever says. I have written it so that you can end your back pain once and for all and avoid a life of despair. I say this as a physician who has treated more than ten thousand patients in thirty-five years of private practice and as a past president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine, the medical society that represents physicians practicing a multidisciplinary approach to the treatment of pain.

I have seen many patients so wracked by pain that they wished they were dead, and some who actually attempted suicide before they saw me. So I am aware of the helplessness that you and millions like you feel when you first hobble into the doctor’s office and exclaim, “Doctor, my back is killing me! I can’t go on like this!”

Let me describe a common scenario: after some pokes and prods, the doctor says, “Go home, take an aspirin, lie down, and rest.”

You do as the doctor says. But it does no good, and two days later, having missed work, you see the doctor again. “Well,” says the doctor, “you have a case of nonspecific low back pain. We see a great deal of it.”

The diagnosis sounds scientific, but it leaves you completely baffled and still wracked with pain.

“What does ‘nonspecific low back pain’ mean, Doctor?”

“It means that we don’t know the cause.”

“You don’t know the cause?”

Should you ask more, you’ll learn that nonspecific low back pain, also known by the acronym NSLBP, is so baffling that the International Association for the Study of Pain devoted an entire chapter to it in Functional Pain Syndromes: Presentation and Pathophysiology, a book for professionals published in 2009. The authors draw the frustrating conclusion that “it is exceedingly difficult to identify specific pathology underlying NSLBP.” Of course, this is of no help to you or to anyone else.

“I can put you on strong medication to dull the pain,” says the doctor. “It may be that your spine is the problem.”

“Does that mean surgery?”

“It could. Surgeons do a million spinal operations a year.”

Surgery on your spine is the last thing you want to do, but your back pain is horrendous. And, of course, you want to get better. So you say, “Can’t we do an MRI or a CT scan to see if there’s anything wrong with my spine?” MRI, or Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is a picture generated by magnetic fields, while a CT (computed tomography) scan is a picture generated by X-rays.

When you are shown the test results, the doctor points out that the images of your spine show that you have, say, a herniated disc (in which the cushion between two bony vertebrae is either protruding or has ruptured) or spinal stenosis (a narrowing of the spinal column that houses your spinal cord), or some other spinal anomaly—and that, apparently, is the cause of your pain.

But if it were true that the abnormality on the MRI or CT scan was indeed the cause of your pain, I wouldn’t have written this book—because almost no one has a “normal” MRI or CT scan of the lower spine, and what is read as abnormal is frequently not the cause of your pain.

That bears repeating: when an MRI shows a herniated disc, it does not necessarily mean that the disc is causing your pain. Many people have a herniated or degenerated disc as a consequence of aging, and yet they have no back pain. Furthermore, it certainly does not mean that surgery is needed.

Actually, studies have shown that patients who get imaging tests increase their chance of undergoing an invasive treatment such as surgery or spinal nerve injections. Studies have also shown that when an MRI or CT scan for back pain indicates that something is “wrong” with the spine, patients are left to believe they will never truly be “normal” again, regardless of whether their pain is ever reduced or eliminated through any form of treatment. And bear in mind that as many as half of all spinal operations fail.

In fact, the primary source of 75 percent or more of all back pain is from the muscles, not the spine. In 2001 a study of more than twenty thousand patients at outpatient medical clinics in the United States found that sprains and strains of muscles and other soft tissue accounted for 70 percent to 80 percent of all back pain. This is strikingly similar to the findings of a study of three thousand patients with back pain conducted at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City in 1946, which revealed that weak and stiff muscles were the source of pain in 83 percent of the participants.

It is truly astonishing that so many physicians who treat back pain have failed to make use of these findings. For years, medical schools have paid very little attention to the muscular system, even though muscles account for approximately half the weight of the body. Medical practice in recent decades has relied increasingly on high-tech imagery for diagnosis. Although high-tech imagery is certainly of great value—as is surgery, when required—neither X-rays nor MRIs nor CT scans are designed to detect the subtle nuances associated with muscle as a source of pain.

Take the case of a patient whom I shall call Stephanie. She is a married attorney who in 2004 began to experience stiffness whenever she got up out of a chair. She also had problems straightening up if she bent over. This was bothersome, but it was nothing compared to her first attack of spasms in her low back, on the right side. The spasms were incapacitating. She couldn’t walk and had to lie in bed for four days, taking...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
2012
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1439167443
ISBN 13 
9781439167441
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
305
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande