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MISSION IS TO EDUCATE THE WORLD ON THE LIFE-CHANGING EFFECTS
OF PROLOTHERAPY |
Letter from Scott Greenberg, MD |
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Why
can’t conventional medicine find your pain? Pain is often
misunderstood and mismanaged in traditional medical settings.
While many of us hurt or have hurt to various degrees during our lifetime, there
is no traditional test to ‘quantify’ our pain, nor does the series of happy and
sad faces to describe our pain level aid in finding adequate relief from our
symptoms.
What we have lost in medicine is our ability to examine the patient, correlate
the examination with the patient’s symptoms, and lastly consider the diagnostic
tests. Instead, we as patients enter the system of pain treatment, done almost
as a mass production protocol involving first a trial of anti-inflammatory medication
and then physical therapy. If these ‘conservative’ measures fail to provide relief,
it’s off to see the surgeon, where the decision is made to have either surgery
or pain management.
As a physician, I never wanted to manage pain, nor would want, as a patient,
to have my pain managed. Having suffered with pain myself, I could not even imagine
living the rest of my life in chronic pain. So why are we so far off the mark
with treatment of pain? I think that the answer lies in two important factors.
First, we are overly reliant on diagnostic tests. Secondly, we have lost the
art of physical examination.
Take, for instance, the case of lower back pain. It is one of the most common
causes of pain and disability in the world, but often misunderstood. Why? Because
most cases are due to musculoskeletal conditions such as sacroiliac joint dysfunction,
pyriformis syndrome, or facet joint arthropathy. Such problems are not seen on
MRI, CT, or X-rays, thus a clinician without expertise in curing these conditions
will not be able to effectively manage them.
Even though we have access to the greatest diagnostic tests in the world, we
as physicians need to use our clinical judgment to determine their significance.
For example, the majority of healthy people who do not have any back pain at
all will have degenerative, bulging, or herniated discs in their lumbar spine.
But if you do have pain, the job of your physician is to determine the relevance
of your test results. It is not a black and white issue in what may be causing
your pain.
So how do we determine what the best treatment courses are for our patients? First
we must listen to our patients and ask the right questions—where is the pain,
where does it travel, is there any numbness or weakness? What makes it better
and what makes it worse? Are there any ominous signs like loss of bowel and bladder
function, fever, chills, weight loss, and so on. From our questions alone, the
skilled physician should be able to determine 85% of the diagnosis, and then
confirm it with physical examination.
The examination is key to determine and confirm the root cause of pain, and unfortunately
it is becoming a lost art. Many of my patients have told me they were recommended
to undergo surgery with either a very brief exam or no exam at all. I find this
to be a disservice to patient care that can only lead to bad outcomes. The physical
exam is not without its faults, and to be reliable must be performed with experienced
hands. Palpation of ligaments, tendons, and joints is a skill and an innate gift
to those that possess the ability to acquire its skill. Skilled hands have the
ability to determine damaged, weak, and painful joints from those that are normal.
This critical tool allows us to incorporate all of the information about a patient’s
condition and formulate a treatment plan.
There is no one size fits all formula to treat a pain condition. However, most
pain and sports injury conditions are curable, in the right hands, with reconstructive
and regenerative treatments such as Prolotherapy. I found my way to a complete
cure after suffering for over 10 years, and I wish you the best in finding your
solution, as it exists. If not then hold on tight as we are working on new solutions
and treatment options to cure pain and arthritis, all without ever going under
the knife.
Scott Greenberg, MD |
JOP
COMMENTS
Well said Dr. Greenberg!
Obviously, one of the messages we are trying to promote here at JOP is
that pain can be resolved, whereas just managing the pain by other methods will
leave the underlying disease process untouched, free to continue to worsen. Prolotherapy
is one method of treatment that has the potential to stop and reverse the underlying
degenerative process. The net result is pain resolution, not pain management!
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