Pain Is Not a Lifestyle
“OMG does my back ache!”
“You, too? And I've got a burning pain going down the back of my leg.”
“Well, I got hit hard playing football last week and I can't even stand up straight. What happened to you?”
“Oh nothing so heroic. I just bent over to pick up my nephew's toy. And I could hardly get up.”
“Well, what are we going to do? Who should we see? A neurosurgeon? An orthopedist? Or a chiropractor?”
“Oh you don't want to see a chiropractor, they're quacks.”
So the conversation would have gone just 40 years ago, when the AMA's Committee on Quackery was busy disseminating false information to the press and Congress in “an effort to destroy the chiropractic professionby calling them 'unscientific cultists' with the intention to contain and eliminate the chiropractic profession.''
Perhaps the choice of provider should be made based on the outcome you would hope to have. Do you want drugs to control the pain? Surgery to remove a body part that might be causing the problem? Or a noninvasive therapy that can return your musculoskeletal system back to an effective functioning body?
The summary of recent research conducted by the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries was published in the December 2012 issue of the prestigious SPINE magazine. Washington State was concerned about the high cost of back surgeries due to on the job injuries. Since back injuries are the most common occupational injury in the United States, they wanted to identify any early predictors of the likelihood of spinal surgery in the three years following a worker's initial injury.
They used medical bill data to determine whether participants underwent surgery or not. The study included 1,885 workers, of whom 174 (9.2%) had a lumbar spine surgery within three years. A worker's odds of having surgery was reduced if they were 1) under the age of 35, 2) a women, 3) a Hispanic, or 4) if their first care provider was a chiropractor. Of those workers who first saw a surgeon, 42.7% had surgery. In contrast, only 1.5% had surgery if they first saw a chiropractor. There was a very strong association between surgery and first provider seen for the injury, even after adjustment for other important variables.
So, what would your choice be?
