Friday, February 05, 1999
Sufferers can treat back pain, doctor says
BY SUE MacDONALD
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Dr. Art Brownstein learned the hard way, but he offers this advice passionately: If you're suffering from back pain, do not go to your doctor and expect to get better.
He's a medical doctor, but after experiencing excruciating pain and debilitating side effects from back surgery 13 years ago, he began his own search for safe back-pain knowledge and relief.
The result is Healing Back Pain Naturally (Harbor Press; $19.95), a comprehensive plan of stretches, nutrition, exercise, mind-body connections and stress management to heal back pain, even the kind that puts people on the floor gasping for a breath and unable to stand.
Dr. Brownstein will speak and sign his book 7 p.m. Wednesday at Joseph Beth Booksellers in Norwood.
Like many Americans, Dr. Brownstein was treated with traditional medicine's arsenal: drugs, painkillers, braces, electrical stimulators, traction devices, muscle relaxants and ruptured disc surgery. The result: even worse back pain and eventual addiction to narcotics.
“What happened to me I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy,” says Dr. Brownstein, a medical lecturer at the University of Hawaii and a certified yoga instructor. “I consider myself a mainstream physician, but I saw that my profession doesn't understand back pain, and once they start monkeying with you, there's a chance that things will get worse, especially if they go in and operate.”
He rattles off the statistics: Eight in 10 Americans will have back pain at some point in life; 7 million Americans miss work every day from back pain, which saps $100 billion a year from the economy and is the most common cause of worker's disability in adults under 45.
Even people who have undergone disc or vertebrae surgery can benefit from his stretching-stress relief program, he says, to prevent another surgery, which happens about 50 percent of the time.
“If I had practiced earlier in my life what I now know, I never would have needed surgery,” says the 48-year old physician.
Disc surgery in '86
Dr. Brownstein's back pain evolved from a loading-dock job in high school, worsened under the stress of medical school and peaked while he was a U.S. Air Force flight surgeon. In 1986, he underwent surgery for a ruptured disc, but the pain worsened. Eventually, he quit taking drugs and began seeking information about backs from throughout the world, especially the Far East and India.
From that search he developed the Back to Life program, which is based on yoga and other body-mind practices that focus on the muscles, spine and stress. Up to 35 Back to Life stretches, presented in three phases, target muscles that move and support the back — legs, buttocks, knees, feet, shoulders, pelvis and spine.
Stress and emotions, he found, are just as influential in back pain as structural factors. Among his key points about back pain:
• Back pain is primarily a muscle problem. “Your body is very clear about where the pain is and where the problem is, but modern medicine totally bypasses the muscles and heads straight for the bones and discs and MRI's (magnetic resonance images) and surgery,” he says. “Get away from this old model of focusing on the bones and discs and nerves. Focus on the muscles. The muscles are out of shape because we spend most of our time sitting.”
When muscles that support the back become weak, imbalanced, stressed and tight, they cause the spine to compress and tilt. They squeeze and pinch nerves and discs — all symptoms of muscle problems that are typically diagnosed as back pain. Stretching muscles back to their normal length and flexibility uncompresses spines, releases pinched nerves and unbulges discs, he says.
“The good news is that muscles are totally plastic and educable. You can bulk them up and you can also stretch them.”
• “Degenerative disc disease is the most archaic and useless term. It doesn't give hope to anybody. It's based on a click of an X-ray frame, a moment in time of a picture of the spine,” Dr. Brownstein says. “Because muscles don't show up on the X-ray, it's not a very useful tool in showing what's going on in the back.” Other diagnoses that can be reversed by muscle-stretching include arthritis, scoliosis and bone spurs, he says.
• Back pain is rarely an instantaneous event caused by doing something wrong. A specific movement may trigger intense, shooting pain, but back pain is usually the result of years of stress, misuse, sedentary lifestyles, jobs and lack of stretching.
Be responsible for self
He urges back-pain sufferers to look inward for solutions and keys to back pain and to be willing to make the lifestyle changes necessary to conquer and prevent it. He's especially critical of the surgical hardware industry that promotes metal rods, plates, screws, springs and brackets as solutions for back problems and an insurance industry that pays for workers' disability claims but not prevention.
“I relied on the medical professional to heal me, and I thought the operation was going to fix me,” he says. “We don't realize that the ultimate responsibility for our own health and healing lies in our own hands, and we don't realize that our body's natural propensity to heal itself is already there.”
Dr. Brownstein knows his back pain will return if he doesn't stretch and strengthen his back through exercise, relaxation and pacing his activities. He surfs and has a busy medical practice. Confronting the pain is critical, he says.
“We don't do pain very well in our society,” he says, acknowledging a cultural mind-set that prefers a pill over self-help, a quick-fix over hard work. “We try to suppress pain and fix it instead of listening to it as a message from our bodies that we're our of balance. But where there's pain, there's still life, and if you're willing to listen to that, you can heal it.
“The pain is there for a reason,” he says. “Listen to it. Your back is your teacher.”
IF YOU GO
• Who: Dr. Art Brownstein, preventive medicine specialist, University of Hawaii medical instructor and author of Healing Back Pain Naturally (Harbor Press; $19.95).
• What: Book signing and back-health lecture.
• When: 7 p.m. Feb. 10.
• Where: Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Rookwood Pavilion, 2692 Madison Road, Norwood. 396-8960.
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