Author Archive

Conditioned Pain Modulation

Friday, January 10th, 2014 at 1:08 PM  

Have you ever noticed that pain in one area took your attention away from pain in another spot?  For example, you were feeling back pain and then jammed your toe, and your back pain diminished or went away.  As the toe pain reduced, the back pain reappeared.  Conditioned Pain Modulation (CPM), formerly known as DNIC (diffuse noxious inhibitory control), is the phenomenon where pain in one area inhibits pain in a different area of the body.

Another example is seen in patients who have pain that is noticeably worse on one side of the body than the other.  Once pain is treated on their “bad” side, their “good” side seems to get much worse.  In this case, pain on the “good” side was always present, but becomes more noticeable once the worst pain was addressed.

In fibromyalgia syndrome patients, there appears to be impaired CPM. [i]  CPM is one reason why understanding a patient’s pain complaint is challenging.


[i] Davis, Mellar P. “The Clinical Importance of Conditioning Pain Modulation: A Review and Clinical Implications.” Research and Development of Opioid-Related Ligands (2013): n. pag. Print.

 

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Spine surgery and exercise

Tuesday, July 23rd, 2013 at 8:42 AM  

I was interviewed, on Doctor Radio on Sirius XM. One of the callers told us that after she had spine fusion her pain was eliminated but if she didn’t do exercises at least every other day her muscles above and below the surgical site would tighten up and  pain would begin to return. Even when surgery is indicated for back pain, proper conditioning of the postural muscles is still important.

If she didn’t have a good physical therapist and she wasn’t motivated to doing her exercises her surgery might have been considered a failure, another Failed Back Syndrome. Too often the need to address muscle health is overlooked in the treatment of persistent pain problems. As I emphasize in End Back Pain Forever, exercise and physical conditioning should be taught in grade school and encouraged throughout our life.

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Epidural Steroids- Are they worth the downside risk?

Thursday, October 11th, 2012 at 12:47 PM  

The tragic occurrence of meningitis, stroke and death following use of infected steroids used for spine injections should make us more aware that this very common treatment for back pain may not be worth the risks. The use of epidural steroid injections (ESIs) to shrink an inflamed nerve thought to be causing back pain has not been shown to consistently reduce pain and even when it does the benefit is frequently short-lived. Aside from infection, other rare but serious side effects include bleeding that can cause  nerve damage with possble weakness and paralysis, and additional pain. Steroids themselves have been the cause of bone  (aseptic necrosis) and tendon  damage.

Multiple medical professional organizations have suggested that ESIs should not be used for long standing back or neck pain or for pain in the back or neck that does not radiate to the arms or legs. Despite the evidence that even when ESIs reduce or eliminate pain, at best they are useful for 3 months or less. Other countries i.e. Denmark, rarely use ESIs. 

As long as a thorough physical examination does not take place with all patients complaining of back or neck pain, with the purpose of determining if muscles are a source of pain, we will continue to rely on imaging studies that lead us to mistakenly believe that all back pain comes from the spine and the nerves leaving the spine. Continuing to provide unnecessary and ineffective treatments not only squanders our limited resources but could cause irreparable harm.

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Why do we over-prescribe strong pain medication?

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012 at 10:01 AM  

The NY Times on 4/9/2012 ran a story about the overuse and unintended negative consequences of strong (opioid) pain medication. They mentioned opposing views concerning the liberal use of opioids. I participated in a debate in 1995 about the inappropriate use of the diagnosis “Chronic Pain Syndrome”(CPS) in patients whose muscles had not been assessed as a cause of their persistent pain, which resulted in the justification to put some of these patients on opioids for the rest of their lives.   

Since then one of the largest growth industries in medicine is the evaluation and treatment of back and neck pain, currently accounting for ~$100 billion in direct medical costs. The pain juggernaut is fueled in part by ignoring muscles which are the most common reason for pain complaints. Addressing the incorrect causes of pain leads to inappropriate, expensive and potentially harmful treatments with poor outcomes, persisitent pain, and overuse of opioids. CPS is a license to prescribe life-long medication. Chronic use of opioids has not been studied for its overall impact on patients with CPS but neither have any of the other medications that we are now using. Does the marginal reduction in pain in many of the patients taking these medications justify their costs and side effects? As the Times reports, for some patients the treatment is actually making them worse.

Imagine if some of these patients had pain that could be eliminated. Many do; it’s from muscles that are not evaluated or treated in a systematic way.  My new book, End Back Pain Forever, to be released by Atria on June 5, 2012 is a wakeup call to change the way we are treating common pain problems.

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