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Back pain has a way of taking over your life. For anyone who hasn’t dealt with the issue, it’s difficult to understand how it can affect every aspect of your daily routine. Sneezing and bracing yourself for the pain – dreading speed bumps as you ride in cars – the agony of long plane flights, and more. Today’s topic is one that Dr. Sorr knows about first hand: back pain solutions.
Dr. Sorr: “As a person who has dealt with back pain since I was 18 years old, I truly understand what sufferers are going through. How many times have you considered surgery? What a Rolodex of options: Microdiscectomy, laminectomy, nerve blocks, radiofrequency ablation, spinal fusions…
STOP and please read this – hear me out. Surgery is less successful than flipping a coin. So, why do many people do it? Desperation! I could fill an ocean full with my tears for the people who have had their surgeries fail. There’s incredible grief for anyone who’s gone through general anesthesia and then experiences the same pain – or worse afterward. The madness has to stop.”
Back Pain – The Root Source
“Without stability, you cannot exert your power.”
Your quest to cure your back pain has likely taken you down all sorts of paths. You may have been devoting yourself to core crunches, gone to yoga classes, experimented with pharmaceutical remedies like muscle relaxers, formed an attachment to your heating pad, used CBD oil, and left a trail of menthol scent from your pain patches everywhere you went. But is it really helping? Everyone has a source for their back pain, and without locating it, you’ll just keep treating symptoms.
Instead of a surgical consult, finding a doctor who will take the time to listen and work with you is more meaningful. Let’s examine how a comprehensive, holistic approach to treating your back pain can help you step away from invasive surgeries and finally heal.
Out of the many causes of back pain, let’s talk about some of the ones that Dr. Sorr sees in his patients most, and how a rapid diagnosis and surgical intervention isn’t always the best route forward, or even the correct one.
- Pressure from a disc on nerve roots can pinch them and create radiating pain. The catch-all name for this is Sciatica – but that’s not always an accurate diagnosis.
- Ligaments and tendons involved with your back can become strained or have chronic injuries. In this case, disc surgery will not make things better.
- Slipping vertebrae can cause a dangerous situation that leads to fractures. Again, there are non-surgical treatment options available.
- More insidiously, your everyday habits may be an underlying cause of musculoskeletal pain. Chronic poor posture, repetitive movements, and a sedentary lifestyle can have profound effects. Just think of it as: “Sitting is the New Smoking”.
- Last, metabolic diseases can profoundly affect your bones, joints, and muscles. Autoimmune diseases such as Rheumatoid Arthritis are a key player, and other illnesses can create back pain. Diabetes, obesity, metastatic cancer, prostate issues in men, pelvic floor, uterine, and uterine problems can all contribute to severe back pain.
How Conventional Medicine Fails Us
The conventional medicine approach is fantastic when we’re treating emergencies and infections. It works quickly, it keeps you alive, and it saves you from major harm. However, it falls far short when we’re addressing chronic disease. Here, it can turn into a long term treatment plan that follows the path of least resistance. It suppresses symptoms while never getting to the root of the issue.
It’s a tempting road to take. Anti-inflammatories get short-term results but can’t be taken over and over. Pain pills can create a cycle where patients switch off their pain but then injure themselves as they overuse the affected area. Addiction to opioids is a national epidemic – why risk it?
It’s time to start a new course of action. At Source of Health, we focus on an approach we call “Live Better, Heal Better, Move Better”. By setting up these key pillars to resolving pain, we can avoid invasive surgeries and start healing from within.
Live Better
When you visit Source of Health for the first time, you become part of our family. Our goal is to listen to you, hear your concerns, ask the right questions, and begin a relationship where we work as partners to improve not just your back pain but also your total health. We’ll review any recent imaging, labs, or other pertinent information. But most importantly, we’ll listen. Once we reach a diagnosis, together we will develop a treatment plan that’s customized specifically to your needs and goals. This will focus on restoring your foundation of wellness, providing regenerative treatments, and adding movement-based therapies.
At your initial Discovery Session, you’ll meet with Dr. Sorr. At that time, he’ll order any blood tests or imaging that’s needed to hone in on your diagnosis.
Next, we’ll schedule your “WheelBarrow Visit.” Here’ we’ll go over all of your past and current medications and supplements. We’ll also work out a diet and lifestyle plan that’s tailored for your specific needs.
Ensuring the fundamentals of health for our patients can sometimes be as simple as eliminating inflammatory foods from their diet and helping them get better, more restorative sleep. In other cases, we may evaluate and treat specific hormone deficiencies, like low testosterone or estrogen. The goal is to restore balance for optimum functioning.
Heal Better
The purest form of regenerative medicine centers on stimulating self-healing at the source of the pain. With back issues, this can be difficult, even impossible to reach using conventional methods. However, tools such as Prolotherapy and PRP can have great success as a treatment. Compared to Tissue Repair Therapy approaches, they can help patients avoid treatments that can be cost-prohibitive and frankly unnecessary in the case of back pain.
Treatments such as regenerative injections will be scheduled approximately 2-3 weeks after getting started with us. This can be a lot of information for most patients to absorb, and taking the time to integrate each is essential.
Move Better
Your Move Better Analysis is a meeting with our Doctor of Physical Therapy. They’ll establish current movement and pain parameters and create a custom movement plan for you to practice at home.
Physical Therapy has an unfortunate reputation for anyone who has been dealing with chronic back pain. We understand! If you’ve been going through session after session of PT without success, it’s easy to burn out on the concept. However, we can help you discover the adaptations you’ve been using to compensate for prior injuries. When you rewire that mind-body connection, a true resolution of your problems can occur.
Re-Evaluation
This is another important part of your recovery! As your diagnostics are crucial to discovering the appropriate treatment plan, retesting is our version of before and after that is so satisfying. Seeing inflammatory signals and hormone imbalances fizzle away is rewarding, to say the least.
Back pain is difficult to conquer due to a multitude of reasons. Coming up with a plan that is reasonable, prudent, and doable for each person is essential to long term success. We take great pride in giving solutions that are comprehensive and thoroughly get our patients back on track. In Dr. Sorr’s words: “I love to have you imagine a car that’s driving and then loses control – the brakes and steering are not responding, and panic ensues. Just rewinding the clock backward will not help long term. The cause of the malfunction is that of trajectory. We help you rewind the clock and learn how to drive better. This is why Source of Health is unique, and that’s why our process works so well.”
If you are ready to schedule a Discovery Session or have any questions, please contact our Scottsdale office.
