First, comparing cancer to musculoskeletal pain is unfortunate. Second, telling a patient the pain is ‘in their head’ is demonstrating a lack of knowledge for pain science or up to date research.
I, like you, see patients everyday, all day. The patients I see are iatrogenic disasters. Chronic, persistent pain from the duldrums of the biomedicalization that is low back pain. They’ve seen every chiropractor, osteopath, pain clinic, physical therapist and ‘spine specialist’ within 100 miles. Had the x-rays and MRI or newest medical image on the T.V. What did they all have in common? They all told the patient what “tissue” was the problem. They took this ‘expertise’ to heart and got adjusted, mobilized, exercised, manipulated, strengthened, lengthened, corrected, injected, laminectomied and fused without relief. This is what I see all day, every day. It’s 20% of the world’s population.
First, comparing cancer to musculoskeletal pain is unfortunate. Second, telling a patient the pain is ‘in their head’ is demonstrating a lack of knowledge for pain science or up to date research.
I, like you, see patients everyday, all day. The patients I see are iatrogenic disasters. Chronic, persistent pain from the duldrums of the biomedicalization that is low back pain. They’ve seen every chiropractor, osteopath, pain clinic, physical therapist and ‘spine specialist’ within 100 miles. Had the x-rays and MRI or newest medical image on the T.V. What did they all have in common? They all told the patient what “tissue” was the problem. They took this ‘expertise’ to heart and got adjusted, mobilized, exercised, manipulated, strengthened, lengthened, corrected, injected, laminectomied and fused without relief. This is what I see all day, every day. It’s 20% of the world’s population.
Have a look at the link. It’s a simple read.
Geez! Do I really need to qualify those statements? Apparently. The camparison wasn’t between cancer and pain. I used it to demonstrate the critic who likes to use completely misguided statistics to demonstrate they have it all figured out and everyone else is wrong. Like the acupuncturist who provides a few anecdotal stories of curing cancer while blasting mainstream medicine for failing because cancer has not been completely eradicated from society.
Although I use the term " all in their head" with a tongue and cheek implication, this is what you are implying. Irregardless of what is going on in the body, it has nothing to do with a person experiencing pain. I am willing, and have for years, to allow a psychosomatic link and even cause for the phenomenon of pain. However, I cannot disregard over a decade of seeing people’s lives changed by the tools this “bio mechanical” model has provided. Not only for others, but for myself as well. As someone who was nearly crippled at the age of 18, and riddled with chronic pain, I am able to get around pretty well because of T&S, Janda, and those little brown men 5,000 miles away who were trying to find union with God.
What I have been trying to get to with these statements and comparisons is that, if what is being done “does not work”, then what is your solution? You have provided the critiques of the bio mechanical model, which concedingly has problems and is an incomplete view of the pain picture, but you have not provided a solution or a clear model of which a comparison can be made. I can give you cancer statistics all day, and shape them in a way that would imply what is being done does not work, but where are the statistics showing success of the alternative? There are none. What we have are a few anecdotal stories of practitioners " healing people", that are no more impressive than those of spontaneous remission.
I am not in entire disagreement with you. I have heard all of this before. I am trying, unsussefully apparently, to get to what you think the solution is.
Furthermore, we have to be really careful with trends and statistics regarding any aspect of medicine or therapy. The basis of comparison is non- existent. As little as 30 years ago, people didn’t talk about pain, they didn’t go to mt’s pt’s or chiro’s. They sucked it up and dealt with it for the most part. So statistics that show the growing reliance on pain meds, massage, chiro’s etc. does not mean they are not working. It simply means they are being more widely used and available, in addition to the fact that people realize they don’t have to just deal with it and there are solutions. Again I point to cancer. 50 years ago people didn’t t get regular screenings and have access to the diagnostic capabilities that are available today. So of course the incidence of cancer cases is going to rise. People will even point to dogs as evidence " something is terribly wrong" when dogs are getting human diseases. This is just hysterical. Our grandparents put a bullet in ol’ fido when the first evidence of a limp arose. They didn’t spend thousands of dollars on advanced screening procedures.
The article you gave is very interesting, but I am afraid it commits some logical fallacies, and unfortunately runs in the opposite direction of what improvements do need to be made in the manual therapy field. Again, It has an arrogant tone that is prevalent when people are on the fringe of mainstream treatments and on the threshold of a new line of thinking. The I am right and everyone else is wrong assertion is easy to make when they have no basis of comparison. While 20% may not be responsive to traditional methods, of that 20% what % is unresponsive to the alternative?