Watch Your Back!: How The Back Pain Industry Is Costing Us More And Giving Us Less_and What You Can Do To Inform And Empower Yourself In Seeking ... Culture And Politics Of Health Care Work) Download Free (EPUB, PDF)
Over the past twenty years, treatment of back pain has become ever more expensive and intensive. Use of MRI scans, narcotic painkillers, injections, and invasive spine surgery have all grown by several hundred percent. In some areas of medicine, newer treatments have improved quality and duration of life, but as back pain is treated more aggressively, annual surveys of people with back pain report steadily worse impairments. In Watch Your Back!, Richard A. Deyo, MD, proposes an approach to managing back pain, which most adults in the United States experience at some point, that empowers the individual and leads more directly to effective care.Though it may seem counterintuitive, fewer medical interventions may produce better results. Expecting a probe, a pill, or a procedure to cure back pain is usually unrealistic, yet entire industries promote the notion that someone else will "fix" you. Watch Your Back! exposes these flaws in the current approach to back pain, along with the profit motives and conflicts of interest behind many of them. The book dramatizes the problems with stories of prominent individuals who encountered high-tech pitfalls, then found low-tech solutions suited to their lifestyles and the nature of their back pain.Watch Your Back! will be useful not only for people with back pain but also for doctors and policy makers. Our health care system has a growing interest in reducing waste, overuse, and unnecessary care. There's a consensus that health care is too expensive and that we get too little for the money. Back pain exemplifies a problem for which we can simultaneously improve quality of care and reduce costs.
Series: The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work
Hardcover: 232 pages
Publisher: ILR Press; 1 edition (October 21, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0801453240
ISBN-13: 978-0801453243
Product Dimensions: 1 x 5.8 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #431,059 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #56 in Books > Textbooks > Medicine & Health Sciences > Alternative Medicine > Chiropractic #70 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Diseases & Physical Ailments > Backache #111 in Books > Medical Books > Allied Health Professions > Chiropractic
I am a chronic back pain sufferer, I have numerous issues in my lower back so was very keen to read this book to see if I could learn something new that might be available to me or that I can advocate for with my own medical care. Sadly not. Nothing new in here.The book is described as being aimed both at the sufferer AND the medical professional, this is where I think it has it's biggest weakness. There is too much statistical data on pharmaceutical companies, medical procedures and the like for the average consumer to want to read. At times it read like a professional journal, and whilst some of that data and chapters may indeed interest some, it did not me. It's irrelevant to me being able to get help for daily 24/7 back pain and life limitations.The book covers all the treatments regularly uses (sometimes incorrectly) for back pain from use of opiate and other medication, facet joint injections, branch nerve block injections, epidurals, physiotherapy, exercise and then off course onto the surgical options of spinal surgery, disc replacement and fusions. It discusses the positives but also highlights the risks to weigh up on all of these things. For this part I did learn some new thing, it was surprising how many treatments are essentially proven to not be that effective, yet we put ourselves through them anyway, trusting it might be the "fix" we are desperate for.I have had all of the above treatments except surgery, I have friends who have had surgery and are no better for it, some in fact worse and this is discussed in the book. What the book does not offer is any answers or solutions of a path to take. It focuses strongly on what does not work and there seems to be no direction as to a course of action that may indeed help overall.There are stories of individuals highlighted in the book including President Kennedy who had ongoing back issues during his life and ended up having surgery which then led to needing another. The stories are interesting but again, offer nothing much that give hope to the back pain sufferer.I see this is a light reference book, more information giving than solution finding. I don't think the average sufferer will get much from this as I did not, except perhaps to wonder if all the treatments we put ourselves through with hope are actually a waste of our time and energy.Disappointing overall, I was hoping for some big revelations. It was an average book on this subject, I have read much better.
The wisdom gained from Watch Your Back is to treat most back pain as if it isnât there. Starve the pain for attention while you go about doing what you most wish to do. For most back pain sufferers, that hard-to-hear approach will deliver more of the life you want with far fewer of the risks that come from surgery, pain killers and injections.Dayo also presents a compelling case to show how the back pain industry, including many back surgery thought leaders, have been compromised in judgment by the hundreds of billions of dollars we give for complex, dangerous and expensive treatments that, on the whole, deliver us more harm than good. Dayoâs prescription for improvement is to inform the patient. He prescribes patient decision aids to help people understand the true risks and benefits of back pain options. Once informed of the truth each person can better decide if the risks of harm are worth a realistic expectation of the benefits.
For those seeking advice on how to live with chronic back pain: this book will not make the decision for you. (Itâs ok, I was hoping for that, too.) The title and subtitle clearly explain the scope of the book: Watch Your Back!: How the Back Pain Industry Is Costing Us More and Giving Us Less - and What You Can Do to Inform and Empower Yourself in Seeking Treatment. 's category choice is another clue: Culture and Politics of Health Care Work. That said, if you are new to back pain, this book will help you navigate the sometimes scary journey to wellness--or to as much of wellness as is possible.For those of us with chronic back issues, the message is one we don't want to hear: healing takes time. Also, most probably, lots of personal effort. We all want the pill or the surgery that will make us pain free, and most often, pain free never happens. There are lots of ways to lessen the pain, though, and the book will help you discover what choices are best for you, and why there are so many options. You may become freshly angry at an industry that promotes options that harm or are ineffective, instead of heal.There are two threads to the story: back pain sufferers and their journeys through the system as patients, and an inside look into therapies from the health providers' perspectives, with side trips through federal regulations, worldwide corporate and research efforts and strategies, free markets, so-called "alternate" healing modalities--and more!Totally recommended for anyone considering surgery. Anyone who has suffered back pain for 10-20 years, I'm not sure you will find anything helpful here--like me, you will probably be reinforced in your existing beliefs about treatment. In my case, no opioids, lots of exercise, and resignation to some pain--but new to me, the knowledge that surgery might actually help the scoliosis part. As with most everything in our society, when you are under medical care, buyer beware: watch your back!(I received an EARC for review from the publisher and netgalley.)
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