The other day I was explaining to a patient that the path of getting rid of chronic pain is rarely a straight course. Healing is normally a roller-coaster ride, beset with dips and valleys. This actually seems to surprise patients.
When people seek out treatment for chronic pain, they want immediate, direct relief of the pain. They want the quick fix for the knee, the back, or whatever is hurting. The patient wants that one part to be the focus of their treatment, and nothing else is considered. Patient’s often leave out important facts about their health, clues that may help the doctor in actually fixing the problem.
Traditional western medicine is to blame for this, continually breaking medical treatment into smaller and smaller specialties, in fact, in many orthopedic offices a knee doctor will not look at the hip or the spine. When treatment of the symptom does not succeed, the patient is often sent to another “specialist” without any continuity in the care. I have seen patients referred from one specialist to another like children playing a game of hot potato. All the while the patient is given addictive and dangerous pain medications to cover the symptoms and bury the underlining cause even deeper.
In most cases chronic pain is the result of a series of small events that, when looked at as a whole, leads to the real reason patients have pain. Muscle imbalance can lead to ligament and tendon problems, this then leads to joint and movement issues that are often the root cause of chronic pain.
In my office, careful functional assessment is made to determine the cause. The key for patient success is to be very clear with the history and onset of your condition. Be clear about the time line of events, each question that is asked is intended to discover the underlining cause. The symptoms you have could be the result of a seemingly un-related stress or injury.
The functional medicine model emphasizes the importance of eliciting the patient's full, unique story, and uses fundamental clinical imbalances to illuminate the common mechanisms underlying most complex, chronic illnesses.
In the blue inner circle, (above), you see the range of life experiences, signs, symptoms, diagnoses, and genetic predispositions that the patient brings into the therapeutic encounter. These are then filtered through the eight elements of the functional medicine matrix model shown in the green portion of the circle. In this disciplined methodology, prioritization occurs, which then leads to appropriate comprehensive management of the patient's problem.
Treatment options now include much more than surgery and pharmacology.
The full gamut of appropriate therapeutic modalities can be used, appropriately matched to the underlying mechanisms that are influencing the patient’s condition.
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www.thespineline.com
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