I had been having trouble with my neck, shoulder and back for a few years, post bike accident, and finally got insurance, Kaiser, so I began to seek treatment. I was referred for PT and when that wasn't helping, my PT referred me to Physical Medicine. I'd worked with an osteopath before getting insurance and liked the whole-body approach, so I specifically chose to see a DO in the Physical Medicine Department, and ended up with Dr. Rosen. Upon meeting him, his demeanor was dour, he barely looked up to make eye contact with me, and he seemed really depressed, actually. But OK, people have their stuff... He managed to listen to my story, typing away as I talked, never making the slightest personal connection, and then referred me for MRIs. When I saw him weeks later, he reviewed the results with me thoroughly. I had many questions and he spent a good bit of time talking me through them, albeit impatiently. When it came time to propose solutions, cortizone was his main recommendation. I told him I'd heard it can cause diabetes or elevate your blood sugar, but he assured me that while some steroids do that, the ones he used did not. I decided to get a steroid injection in the bursitis in my shoulder. There were also bone spurs there but he said there was nothing that could be done for that. When I tried to possibly link the shoulder issue to some out-of-alignment I felt in my scapula/upper back, in hopes that maybe the underlying problem might be addressed, it fell on deaf ears. Any attempt I made to try to see the bigger picture of my well-being was actually not only disregarded, but was somewhat angrily disagreed with. So, OK, Western medicine has it's limits, but maybe benefits too, so I agreed to the shot. Well, it helped about 40% for about 4 weeks, but I also began feeling agitated and just not right, afterward. I tested my blood sugar, which had previously been normal, and it was up to 105, which is considered pre-diabetic. Thank goodness I did not let him inject me at the sites of facet arthritis in my neck and low back! As to that, after saying no to cortizone there, he recommended a procedure where the pain nerves coming out of the arthritic joint are deadened. He gave me the name of it and told me to look it up online, offering nothing about its side effects or pretty much anything. When I asked if it would help the sciatica that seemed to emanate not from there but further over toward my buttocks more, which had been my chief complaint, he suggested that we do the procedure and find out that way. I asked about PRP (platelet rich plasma) for these sites and he said they were not approved by Kaiser because there's no evidence suggesting it worked. OK, that's the Kaiser party line, I get it. But he was personally so uninformed as to believe this to be true. The internet is full of evidence to the contrary, especially for facet arthritis, my exact condition. (That's the route I'm going to pursue -- outside of Kaiser, of course.)
So, if you need a medical drone to go through the motions and never take you in as a person (even less so than the average conventional medical doctor does) and just run some expensive tests and offer standard western solutions, and you don't care about personality or rapport or being accurately informed about the procedures recommended, then you have found your man! Good luck. read more
