What Can Be Done for Spinal Pain?

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At Mercola.com, Dr. Joseph Mercola gives his recommendations for alleviating spinal pain. He writes:

Surgeries often have a variety of risks that patients do not learn about until after they’ve had the surgery and experienced those complications, which is a huge problem since you can’t “undo” a surgery. For this reason, patients are often advised to seek out a second opinion on if a proposed surgery is really necessary, how likely it will be to benefit them, and what potential risks they face from it.

In turn, spinal surgeries are by far the most common surgery I am consulted about, and likewise something I have become increasingly skeptical of as the years go by. Unfortunately, since spinal surgeries , there has been a general reluctance by the medical field to seriously consider if their risks outweigh their benefits or if .

One of the most common reasons patients see their doctors is for spinal pain. Yet, despite trillions having been spent on it (e.g., in 2016, 134.4 billion dollars was spent on neck and low back pain in the USA) the majority of these patients are stuck with chronic pain, and frequently experience significant side effects from the treatments they receive to temporarily alleviate it.

Since pain is typically one of the greatest motivations for a patient to seek care, I often wonder if the current state of affairs exists because too many parties cannot afford to lose all the money to be made from pain management.

Note: Cures that threaten lucrative markets are frequently suppressed by the medical industry. One of the most well-known examples occurred during COVID-19, where off-patent drugs (e.g., hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine and nitazoxanide) were repeatedly demonstrated in clinical to be highly effective in treating the infection, but could never receive an approval (or EUA) for that use.

Instead a variety of unsafe and ineffective products (e.g., remdesivir and the mRNA vaccines) were pushed onto the market so a lot of money could be made off of them.

Typically, to manage pain, one of the following can be done:

• Fix what is generating the pain so the pain no longer exists.
• Fix an exacerbating factor which is worsening the existing pain.
• Provide a systemic therapy that reduces pain in the body but does not treat the source of the pain.

In turn, when it comes to spinal pain, I feel each of these is not done correctly.

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