You finally decided to take care of your body after waiting and hoping your aches and pains would eventually just magically go away on its own. You thought if I go to the doctor, they might say surgery is needed and you don’t want surgery, so you wait.
You are like all our patients; you wait until your pain really affects your life. And you start spiraling down thinking this injury is going to get me. I am now going to have to slow down. Maybe I won’t be able to travel in the near future or I won’t be able to play with my kids or grandkids. This injury will stop me forever in trying to stay active! Our brains always go to the worst case scenario.
You go to your doctor, and they tell you to rest and take medications. Of course, you wasted another month of your life and you are really depressed because it is not working. You can not be active out of fear of making it worse.
You go back to the doctor, and they send you to a specialist! You tell them you are not sure what you did to hurt your back, or knee, or shoulder or whatever is hurting. They do a 10 min assessment and say let’s take x rays and then get an MRI so we can “see what is going on.” Umm, that won’t work.
You wait again and still have no answers. You are hopeful that maybe the MRI will show you exactly what is going on. That will give you answers.
If they find something on the MRI which as we age you will always find something on the MRI which may or may not be your problem. You just spent $1500 on this picture that is not reliable on telling us much of anything as we age.
Did you know that there is sooooo much research on MRI’s on the normal population without any pain or problems and 80-90% will show something? That as you age the more likely they will find something that was probably there before you had pain there!
That is problem #1. A costly MRI that usually leads you down the path of more unnecessary procedures.
Maybe they find something or maybe they don’t – we have recently had clients that the ortho specialist sends them to a Rheumatologist because they say your pain is due to arthritis.
Now this client went to the rheumatologist for 2 years. All her tests were normal, yet the doctor said she has arthritis all over her body. They had been giving her medications and injections every quarter in her back and she was getting WORSE!
We are finding more and more clients are being told they have arthritis, yet all the testing is coming back negative and because they are getting that diagnosis, they are depressed that they have to live with this pain for the rest of their life.
PROBLEM #2- costly medications and injections that are unnecessary!
So now we are starting to rack up a bill between all the testing and the doctor visits and still no answers and even more depressed that you are going to have to live with your pain for the rest of your life! Our clients that find us have been dealing with their issues sometimes for years before they find us.
Well this client that had been going to the rheumatologist for 2 years and getting worse happened to find us. We spoke with her about her back and hip pain and said absolutely the things you are telling us are patterns we see all the time and we can help. After the first visit, she was better and felt for the first time she was finally in control of her health! She for the first time in 2 years had hope she was going to be able to get her life back! And she did. She is pain free now and back to walking, working and traveling without any problems!
So when you go down the MRI, which can lead to Injections and those do not work, then it gets to Problem #3 with our healthcare system.
Problem # 3 – a costly surgery that may or may not work!
So now you are doing a 30 – 100 thousand dollar surgery. Did you know that with back pain, that one surgery often leads you to your 2nd and 3rd surgery? So triple that number.
That is just one person! We have to stop this madness.
There was research done by Donelson in 2019 in the Journal of Manual and Manipulative Therapy. Now don’t worry about me getting too technical. This will be easy to follow.
They had over 5000 people in this research study, and they looked at back pain and looked at cases managed by doctors and cases managed by physical therapists who specialize in critical thinking in getting to the source of the problem similar to our physical therapist’s training at our office.
They found out of all those people seen by a physical therapist, reduced imaging needed by 50%, injections by 39%, and surgeries by 78%!
Are you kidding me…
That is a lot of savings in our healthcare and a lot of frustrations that are not needed.
Now I know these results because we see the same thing in our office. In fact, we have never sent a back pain patient to surgery in 4 years! We have had other body parts that we have sent to surgery, but zero back pain patients to surgery. We have saved many people from having back pain surgery, even some that had surgery scheduled.
These are huge numbers and is just one reason our healthcare costs are out the roof! When you do not get a chance to spend time with patients and just go into testing everything, this will lead you down a bad path. I have no clue how a doctor can spend 10 min with a client and come up with a diagnosis when the client has no clue how they hurt themselves. That is the majority of the people seeing a doctor. Now if you fall and fracture your arm, that does not take long to diagnose. But that is not often what happens.
If you live in the Dallas area and you are looking for a physical therapist to getting to the source of your problem and you want to save money from not going down the path of MRI’s, injections and surgery, then come in for a FREE Discovery Visit to sit down and speak with one of our specialist to help you make a better decision about your health.
