I have hereditary idiopathic scoliosis, with lumbar and thoracic spinal curvatures, medically classified as severe, and for years I have suffered from chronic back pain. I didn't have health insurance for awhile there and my condition was worsening to the point where I had pain pretty much every day and night. In 2020 I got on CenCal and started seeing a physical therapist and a pain management doctor. The procedures done and the medication prescribed at pain management never really helped much, but the PT actually helped quite a bit. Even so, I was still dealing with significant pain, and I was on the lookout for different avenues to get it addressed, different specialists who might be able to help me out. That's when I heard about orthopedic surgeons, and I asked my primary care physician if seeing one might help. He said it would be worth a try and referred to me Dr. Carr.
Dr. Carr did almost nothing to help me and didn't even seem to care about the particulars of my case or treating me as an individual patient. He said I was not a good candidate for any kind of surgery. Basically the only good he did was get my insurance to approve another round of 18 PT sessions, but I could have just done that through my PCP like I did the first two rounds, so that wasn't something I needed Dr. Carr in order to do. He did suggest a couple posture exercises to incorporate into my PT sessions and my at-home regimen, but I've been doing them semi-regularly for months now and I can't say they've helped much.
Beyond that, he suggested a couple books for me to read, which I did so in between my initial visit and the followup appointment. One was Dr. Mark D. Brown's "Conquer Back and Neck Pain: Walk It Off!", which had some good info in it but nothing I wasn't already aware of and practicing, namely doing daily cardio and low impact exercise and working toward a healthy weight. The other book, however, I was very disheartened to have suggested to me once I realized what it was. I didn't recall at the time, but after the appointment I remembered I had ran across it before, and it struck me then as it did now as complete quackery: "Dr." John Sarno's "Healing Back Pain: The Mind Body Connection."
If you're not familiar with this book, or with Sarno and his crackpot theories about "tension myositis syndrome", a quick google search will tell you that it is all regarded as unfounded pseudoscience with no proven experimental basis and is rejected by the medical community at large. What he claims is that almost all back and neck pain is caused entirely by your repressed emotions of anger or anxiety, and that it has no physical origin whatsoever, regardless of any musculoskeletal injuries or diagnoses you might have, and that the cure to your back pain is simply to realize and truly believe it's all in your head, and then supposedly in a few week's time your pain will be gone! That's it! Like magic, you will be cured! What a fucking load of bullshit!
What gets me the most is that Sarno actually argues AGAINST any kind of physical treatment for back pain, that it will be counterproductive or even harmful since the pain is NOT physical in nature, and all a doctor is doing by prescribing physical treatments is training the patient to focus on the physicality instead of the repressed emotions, and so not addressing the supposed actual cause. So he asserts that things like PT and surgery are NOT the way to go. I didn't know whether Dr. Carr just hasn't actually read this book he's recommending to patients and doesn't know what it's really about, or if he just doesn't give a fuck that he's telling his patients to read a book that directly contradicts other treatment plans he prescribes them. Either way, it's pretty damn irresponsible.
So at the followup I asked him why he had been supportive of more PT while at the same time recommending I read a book which cautions against it, and what he thinks I should be getting out of a book which tells me the cause of my back pain isn't physical in nature, when I have a well documented medical history of a severe musculoskeletal abnormality? His only response was that he suggests it to many of his patients in case they might get something out of it, it wasn't something specific to me or my case, and if I didn't get anything out of it personally, oh well, but keep with the PT and maybe that will do it. He even said he'd bet I'd be better by the end of this round of sessions. Even at the time, I knew that wasn't going to happen, and having recently completed them, I can say that while it did help somewhat, I am not "better", nor do I believe I am ever going to be completely free of pain. This kind of empty, generalized treatment just left me feeling like he didn't understand or care to understand my personal experience or the kind of pain I am going through, just that since in his estimation surgery isn't the answer, let's just throw whatever else we got at him and see if anything sticks. read more
