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To treat back pain, look to the brain not the spine

aeon.co

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Re: To treat back pain, look to the brain not the spine

#4

Post by neom »

madengr wrote: post #2

Don't know why the author states physical therapy is expensive. It is cheap compared to anything else. Having sciatica on and off for several years, 8 sessions of physical therapy definitely helped, specifically the excercises they teach you.

and "cheap" is relative, my friend.

Re: To treat back pain, look to the brain not the spine

#5

Post by katastic »

I've been living this horror for six years. If I could just magically stop using medicine and not being treated like a drug addict for merely taking prescribed medicine by all walks of society (from cops, to nurses, to neighbors), don't you think I'd have already fucking taken that choice?

The majority of people don't want to be on pills. They want to get better. If I'm in too much pain to physically get out of bed, how am I supposed to exercise? It sounds like this is just an advertisement for CBT, and 90% of it is summed up as "get an anti-depressant" and "go to therapy." Well everyone is already doing that.

I mean, are we really going to suggest everyone in the medical industry related to pain management is just a scam? That doctors don't try a mirade of tools to help their patients and instead just throw addictive pills at them? Surely some do. But who says "I want to go to medical school to sell pills" instead of "helping people"?

I don't know. I find it hard to analytically process this article since I'm so close to the source. But I literally spend >60% of my days in complete writhing agony. I had to FIGHT to get the medicine I needed and I had to FIGHT to get the back surgeries that took me from almost dying to "surviving." So if the world is really handing out pills and surgeries, it sure as hell wasn't doing it in my area.

Re: To treat back pain, look to the brain not the spine

#6

Post by ianai »

katastic wrote: post #5

I've been living this horror for six years. If I could just magically stop using medicine and not being treated like a drug addict for merely taking prescribed medicine by all walks of society (from cops, to nurses, to neighbors), don't you think I'd have already fucking taken that choice? The majority of people don't want to be on pills. They want to get better. If I'm in too much pain to physically get out of bed,…

As a migraine sufferer I feel the same way. I tell people who don't take my pain seriously to watch me take a round of Botox for them. It's something like 8 syringes in my scalp. I absolutely would not go through that if a single migraine didn't inflict much more pain upon me.

I'll never forget having a migraine come back on as I was leaving the ER one night. They had already dosed me up well. All the drugs did though was make me not care that it felt like an ice pick was boring into my head. Still felt the pain.

I've lost way too many things to this pain over the years. It's awful.

Re: To treat back pain, look to the brain not the spine

#8

Post by ta8457348 »

melling wrote: post #3

The Mind Body Approach: Cures back pain, rsi... https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Back-Pain-Mind-Body-Connectio... http://www.rsi.deas.harvard.edu/mb_what_is.html

FWIW, this worked for me.

I had absolutely debilitating pain in a hip joint as if I had a handful of needles loose in there. I had it for several months, I had an MRI, a bone scan, tried physio, acupuncture and what have you with zero effect. At some point got a "procedure" scheduled for some sort of steroid injection directly into the spine column and was prescribed some nasty anti-inflammatory pills to "prep" for the thing (but in the end decided against the whole thing). The only thing that helped _a bit_ were the 600 mg Ibuprofen pills.

In any case, saw this book recommended here on HN, picked it up, read a quarter and realized that it applied. I was under an enormous stress at the time, both on work and personal fronts. On the work side I was running a one-man project with several thousand active daily users. On the personal end we just had a kid and the massive lifestyle change that came with it. A couple of days after realizing that the stress might've been the cause of the pain, the pain disappeared. Just - poof, gone. This was over 10 years ago and it never came back. The end.

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