Source: https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/healing-back-pain-and-ending-the?publication_id=748806&post_id=207621468&isFreemail=true&triedRedirect=true

Story at a Glance:

•Modern medicine acts as a sales funnel, where patients are seen for the minimum time necessary to refer them onward to lucrative services rather than identifying the root cause of their condition.

•Since back pain has multiple causes, 90% of low back pain is simply labeled “nonspecific,” the most common causes go unrecognized and patients are placed on a standardized escalation ladder instead, where almost every rung either misses the actual cause or worsens it (e.g., all the common pain medications have serious issues).

•Some spinal surgeries are necessary or offer tangible benefits. Fusions, the most lucrative ones, have repeatedly failed to outperform non-surgical care in randomized trials while carrying a host of common and serious complications, yet have become increasingly favored — a dynamic illustrated by an extensive investigation of one hospital that generated record revenues from high-volume neurosurgery while its own physicians resigned and departed in protest over what they described as inappropriate surgeries and unsafe conditions.

•Meanwhile, countries without the wealth to sustain a medical monopoly actively explored inexpensive alternatives, and Russia and Eastern Europe built an entire literature around treating disc herniations and radiculopathies with topical DMSO, including a placebo-controlled trial and national treatment guidelines. Hundreds of readers here have independently found the same thing, including many recovering from fusions that had already failed them.

•This article will detail why each step of the conventional pathway is dangerous, the forgotten approaches my colleagues and I have relied upon for decades to resolve neck and back pain without surgery and how DMSO specifically can be used in these instances.

One of the greatest issues in healthcare, which I believe is a reflection of the society at large, is that everything has become so rushed that there is no longer time for doctors to actually connect with their patients. Because of this, a lot of the most critical parts of medicine get missed, and I have known so many patients who were harmed by the medical system because of the fifteen-minute-visit model.

When I started this newsletter, my goal was to correspond with each of the readers who reached out to me, but as this publication has grown that has become impossible. The best solution I have been able to come up with is these monthly open threads, where any question that has accumulated over the last month can be asked publicly (which is much faster for me to work through and lets everyone see the answers), paired with a topic many readers have requested.

This month’s topic is a major shortcoming of medicine that has bothered me for a very long time.