disc shmisc!

When back pain becomes chronic, and fails to resolve with cortisone, chiropractic, physical therapy, acupuncture, stretching, core strengthening, and various forms of deep muscle work it is easily understandable why the disc theory of back pain continues to be the accepted model. What else could it be?

Yet, the more we find out scientifically, the less it makes sense:

1. MRI's of people who have never had an incidence of low back pain in their life, show they have herniated discs.

2. The disc can herniate to the left, looking like it's pinching the left nerve root, yet the pain travels down the right leg.

3. Discs can shrink or disappear on subsequent MRI, all on their own, yet symptoms remain.

4. Half the population over age forty have a herniated disc or other defect deemed significant on x-ray or MRI yet do not suffer chronic pain.

Right now if you have a herniated disc and have no pain it is said to be asymptomatic, or not causing symptoms.

But if you are in pain and a herniated disc is seen, you can be sure it will be blamed on the disc.

I submit to you the disc is irrelevant. It's not whether the disc is symptomatic or not, it's whether your muscles are symptomatic or not.

Doctors sell the herniated disc as though it were fact, but it is not a fact. It is merely the best accepted model to date. And who would have surgery if their orthopedist sounded less than confident in their diagnosis?

In an article, 'A knife in the back', The New Yorker, 4/02, the author gets orthopedic surgeons, sometimes speaking on the condition of anonymity, to admit several things:

"When I began in spine there were a handful of fellowships in the country. There are now over eighty fellowship programs in spine surgery. That means each year more and more specialists are being trained . . . We have new toys to play with - all sorts of screws, rods, and cages. And at the same time, we still don't have a clue where the pain is coming from in the vast majority of chronic sufferers."

"If you have a screwdriver, everything looks like a screw . . . There will be a lot of people doing the wrong thing for back pain for a long time, until we finally figure it out. I just hope that we don't hurt too many people in the process."

"In medicine, if you are able to stick a needle into a person, you are reimbursed at a much better rate by the insurance company. So there is a tremendous drive to perform invasive procedures. At the hospital where I was a fellow training in 1993, discograms were rarely done . . . over the last few years they have come into voge. Surgeons and others order them routinely."

Discography

Often people have more than one herniated disc, and whether it's profit motive, or they really don't know which one they want to operate on, a procedure called discography is performed.

A needle is pressed through your muscles into the edge of each disc with increasing pressure in an effort to reproduce the familiar pain you have been suffering.

The results of discography are controversial but here's the point: what they are looking for in the test, reproducing the familiar pain you've been suffering? That is exactly what I do every time I fix a "disc" case.

Without fail, at some point in the process the patient will exclaim, "That's it, that's my problem!", and I am no where near a disc.

Is back pain all in your head?

Dr. John Sarno, a famous medical doctor on the east coast, and author of the book 'Healing Back Pain, The Mind Body Connection', makes the case that since the hard evidence of back pain doesn't add up, the pain must therefore be all in your head, the result of repressed emotions and anger.

He states, "In the thousands of patients I have examined through the years I have rarely found the involved muscles to be in spasm."

And that is it! What we've all been missing - the UNDERLYING SPASM PATTERN.

It is quite understandable, the way we are taught to feel muscles, nothing sticks out, the underlying pattern is easily missed.

Typical forms of deep muscle therapy including, rolfing, acupressure, stripping etc. work at times but are not able to fix the tough cases. They are over pressing and lack the refinement necessary to unravel advanced spasm patterns.

Technorati: arthritis back disc low muscles pain poor posture sciatica spinal spondylolisthesis stenosis