health

by Baxter A July 18th New York Times blog post entitled Alternatives for Back Pain Relief surprised me when it proclaimed that a modern and widely used treatment method for low back pain is no longer considered effective, especially for chronic or long-standing low back pain. That treatment is the use of injections into the areas of pain. The injections usually contain the inflammation-decreasing drug cortisone, but can also have ingredients like morphine, ibuprofen and vitamin B12 in the mix. Over the years I have had many patients come to me with low back pain, and from their reports, the effectiveness of the injections never seemed particularly strong. For some patients with new acute low back pain, who experienced more serious signs and symptoms, like radiating pain to the leg or actual weakness, the injections more often seemed to provide some temporary pain relief. However, several new studies have revealed that, when looking back at those patients treated with injections, the i...

by Nina Wet Handle Bars by Melina Meza �A comprehensive review published in May in The Clinical Journal of Pain finds that there is �strong evidence for short-term effectiveness� of yoga against back pain, although whether the benefits last beyond a year is less certain.� � Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times Sunday Magazine In this Sunday�s New York Times Magazine, there was a short article called � Spinal Trap ,� about alternatives for treating back pain. The subtitle was �How do you solve back pain? Don�t ask your doctor.� We�ve already heard from Baxter on this topic, when he confessed that he had little to offer his patients when he himself was a family doctor (see For the Young and Old: Back Care ). And you�ll be hearing from him soo n about the comprehensive review mentioned in the quote above. For now, I�d just like to rant a bit about the second half of the sentence: �strong evidence for short-term effectiveness� of yoga against back pain, although whether the benefits last beyond...