Video Transcription

Where do traditional doctors go wrong in treating chronic pain?

I think often medical doctors have forgotten the reason they became doctors. The word doctor means teacher, so at minimum a doctor should be teaching a patient about their condition and how they can resolve their condition. The job of the doctor is to help the person get healthy so they don’t need the doctor. Because the traditional doctor has forgotten this, the traditional doctor tries to get the person some symptom control. So, as it relates to chronic pain, instead of trying to resolve the condition that is causing pain, traditional doctors just give patients symptom control, or a pain relieving medication. What we’ve forgotten in medicine is that the body heals by inflammation. When you give someone an anti-inflammatory or a narcotic medication to suppress the reason for the pain, all you’re doing is accelerating the arthritic process. You definitely are accelerating the arthritic process because what you are doing is suppressing the body’s “alarm system,” which is pain.

What happens when you take an anti-inflammatory or a narcotic medication, it suppresses the body’s ability to heal, plus you’ve suppressed the alarm system. So now the person goes out and does activities, and they don’t have that pain response, so they just go about, doing their normal activities when they shouldn’t, because there is something wrong with the body. They don’t sense the alarm so all that happens is the body decays more and more. Anybody on anti-inflammatory medications for any amount of time will tell you that it eventually stops working, or that they need a stronger and stronger medication. The reason they need a stronger and stronger medication is the arthritic process is getting worse, because they’re stopping the healing process. So, now not only does their knee hurt, but their other knee hurts, their shoulder hurts and so on and so forth. Or, if their knee continues to hurt, then the doctor injects a steroid medication in there that further accelerates the arthritic process or further causes cartilage deterioration.

The better treatment is to regenerate the injured structures. You might not get pain relief right away, but, much like when you hire a personal trainer, you’re not fit right away. However, if you see that personal trainer regularly and you do the exercises the personal trainer tells you to do, in six months or a year, you’re going to be so happy, and you’re going to be so fit. The long term goal is much more important than the short term. In other words, the long term goal should always be to get cured of your pain, get full function back of your extremity or your joint. Get back to full activities, take care of yourself and have a nice life. Surely, I’ll have athletes who have a big tournament coming up, they have a big event coming up, or patients who have a big trip coming up and they want to get better quickly. In those instances, yes, we’ll treat them more frequently, more quickly. We’ll get them better as fast as we can, but really what we’re looking at is the long term. How can I do treatments, and again it make take 6 months, a year, 3-6 visits, 6-12 visits, but how can we make them well for a lifetime? The way to get well for a lifetime is to do Prolotherapy and treatments that stimulate healing. Once a person is healed, they can go and rock climb, jump, run, do whatever it is they want to do.