Free Crooked: Outwitting The Back Pain Industry And Getting On The Road To Recovery Depicted By Cathryn Jakobson Ramin Text

the ways capitalism has fucked up how we treat back pain, basically, Ought to be accompanied by a separate book about all the ways capitalism has fucked up our backs to begin with.
Learned a lot. Cathryn Jakobson Ramin endured back pain for decades and in a quest to find relief spentyears looking into to back pain remedies.
As an investigative journalist, she was the perfect candidate to delve into this growing problem in the U.
S. Overbillion a year is spent in our country on relief from back pain, Unfortunately, many of the commonly prescribed procedures offer no relief for pain or are actually harmful, leaving the patient worse off than before the procedure.
After reading this informative book, I came to understand the best remedy for an aching back is walking and light exercise.
The worse things one can do for an aching back are to have surgery, spinal injections, strong pain relief medication, and/or chiropractic care.
Many individuals who walked and exercised eventually were free from pain and able to move on with their lives.
However, in the U. S. , things probably will not change anytime soon because of big Pharma and the large amount of doctors who make their money from spine surgeries.
If you suffer from back pain, this book is a must read, It's very eye opening! With a spine that's been plaguing me since I was eighteenlet's see, that's fiftytwo years nowand nurturing a rocksolid refusal to allow anyone holding a sharp implement to get within a mile of my spinal cord, I decided to take a look at what Ms.
Ramin might suggest. There's hope to be found in this book and some of her advice seems to have helped me in the pain vs.
mobility department. What's demoralizing to me, though, is her confirmation of something I've suspected since medicine first became a corporate thing with hospitals being bought up by conglomerates there's a bottom line to this stuff, and you and I are considered a bumper crop of financial opportunity.
So the doctor who, twentyfive years ago, said I definitely needed to go under the knife wasn't necessarily motivated by a Hippocratic need to fix my problem.
His purpose may well have been to make a down payment on a Bentley,

What I came away with was confirmation that I was probably right in telling that doctor where to put his scalpel, but also that if things ever got bad to the point of my back being in constant pain and having feet I could see but couldn't feel, there would be a good chance I'd end up in a wheelchair if I gave in to the pressure and allowed a surgeon to "fix" me.
But forget my woes. What Ms. Ramin presents is documentation of one huge reason why your insurance costs have gone up, and will probably continue to do so as doctors beat the drum for performing unnecessary procedures, and raping insurance companies in the process.
I took a star away only in response to bad news and clinical language that tends to inspire sleepbut there was no way the author could help that aspect of things.
It's a clinical subject, so you might consider that I'm being petty with that star, Ms. Ramin worked like a demon on this thing, It deserves better than critiques from me, Read the book. I was very disappointed in this book, The first part of the book totally destroys what current standard health care has to offer for chronic back pain.
The author offers story after story of patients who have suffered greatly by current care, She does not state that complications are a of any treatment not just chronic pain and she does not offer of patients who were helped and happy about their care.

After destroying hope of help from mainstream medicine she offers pain patients a wide range of alternative help.
While I found these treatments interesting I was dismayed by the limited availability of the treatments in any area but big cities.
And really now, who can afford a month long residency at one of the training clinics which are so" successful" I was also dismayed when she reported that she had been doing some exercises "wrong for some time" and the trainer told her they had done no good.
The main premise of the book is "patient cure thyself", Just doesn't tell the average patient who must work every day how to obtain the time, energy, or money to do so.
Yes, Crooked reveals the dark side of the money making back pain industry and spends a lot of time on what NOT to do.
But happily, there's plenty of advice of what one can do and investigate,

Ms. Ramin reinforces that our sedentary lifestyles with too much sitting, heads constantly forward, and a ccurved spine causes deterioration of the spine, muscle loss, and resulting pain.
Then I read and reread the best chapter in the book The Back Whisperers, Turns out proper reconditioning with exercises and soft tissue work can make such a difference, She talks about how we limit our movements and hold our backs in awkward positions to avoid back pain which promotes further back deconditioning.
I'm automatically straightening up as I write this, She goes into detail on the importance of proper body conditioning with correctly executed exercises and how to reduce the effects of poor posture and body movement.

In the end, I came away with the sobering thought that there is no cure for my chronic back pain herniated discs.
But can it be successfully managed and one can return to a normal life,
Crooked is a result of much hard work and incredible amount of research, I wholeheartedly prescribe this book and a personal thank you goes out to Ms, Ramin.
See full review and more at sitelink bookbarmy. com I am certain that future generations will view our presentday methods of treating chronic pain e.
g. , slicing people open and using power tools to carve out their spinal discs, etc, the same way we view bloodletting as an inefficacious and dangerous practice fed by arrogance, ignorance, and greed.


Ive had my doubts about the pain treatment industry some time now, but this book pulled the pieces together into a solid narrative that really left me fuming, particularly at the spine surgery industry.
Or maybe it should be called the “pine urgery” industry,

Anyone who is considering surgery for chronic painshould read this book andshould not get the surgery.
There are so many alternatives that for various reasons are not readily offered or suggested in the health care setting.
The author explores some of these methods, and there are many others that she didnt have room to discuss.


The reason I didnt give this book more is because the author didnt approach all of the treatments entirely objectively.
For instance, she basically says that chiropractic treatment is invalid because cavitations dont show up on xrays.
Then in the second

half of the book she suggests all kinds of alternative treatments where the benefits most definitely would not show up on xrays.
I believe these alternative treatments work, and Im no particular fan of chiropractic treatment, but using one yardstick for treatments she doesnt like and another for treatments she does like suggests she brings some heavy biases into her reporting, which undermines objectivity.
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