Lee Jaffe on sun 20 jun 99
With all the talk about joint pain and arthritis on the list, I thought
my experience might be of interest.
I recently had an interesting conversation with an old friend who is
an anesthesiologist (MD and PhD) and now manages a pain center for
a large teaching hospital. By his own admission, he's a "pills and
needles" type of doctor and, while he does refer patients to alternative
practitioners, he's conservative and skeptical about most new things.
Therefore he really surprised me with some of his suggestions.
I told him about my wife's chronic back problems and he first asked whether
she considered surgery. I said no.
"Good. Don't. The back is a complex system and it needs to
move. If you immobilize part of it, the rest has to compensate.
That puts more strain on those parts and they'll break down."
When I told him her condition was diagnosed as degenerative facet disease,
he said that's a form of arthritis.
"Has she tried Glucosamine? It works. When I first heard about
it from patients, I chalked it up to placebo effect. Then I started
to hear people using it successfully on their dogs and cats. That
ruled out the placebo effect. So I started taking some for lower
back arthritis I was having and have been taking it for a year and
a half and it really helps."
This is a guy I trust. He's "smart like two colleges" (as my mother would
say).
He's got nothing to sell me and no reason to tell me something that wasn't
true. His credentials are about as good as you can get. I think that pain
management is one of the more interesting and cutting-edge areas in medicine
right now, particularly in its attention to patient care and quality of life,
and its openness to other "modalities" as they call the alternative
practices.
And this guy is in the middle of it. Besides, he takes it himself.
Finally, don't take my word for it. I definitely don't recommend anyone go off
and do something medically related without checking with their own doctor or
doing some other research first.
-- Lee Jaffe
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