Watch Your Back!
How the Back Pain Industry Is Costing Us More and Giving Us Less—and What You Can Do to Inform and Empower Yourself in Seeking Treatment
by Richard A. Deyo, MD; Richard Deyo, MD
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Pub Date Oct 31 2014 | Archive Date Oct 07 2014
Cornell University Press | ILR Press
Description
Over the past twenty years, treatment of back pain has become ever more expensive and intensive. Use of MRI scans, narcotic painkillers, injections, and invasive spine surgery have all grown by several hundred percent. In some areas of medicine, newer treatments have improved quality and duration of life, but as back pain is treated more aggressively, annual surveys of people with back pain report steadily worse impairments. In Watch Your Back!, Richard A. Deyo, MD, proposes an approach to managing back pain, which most adults in the United States experience at some point, that empowers the individual and leads more directly to effective care.Though it may seem counterintuitive, fewer medical interventions may produce better results. Expecting a probe, a pill, or a procedure to cure back pain is usually unrealistic, yet entire industries promote the notion that someone else will "fix" you. Watch Your Back! exposes these flaws in the current approach to back pain, along with the profit motives and conflicts of interest behind many of them. The book dramatizes the problems with stories of prominent individuals who encountered high-tech pitfalls, then found low-tech solutions suited to their lifestyles and the nature of their back pain.Watch Your Back! will be useful not only for people with back pain but also for doctors and policy makers. Our health care system has a growing interest in reducing waste, overuse, and unnecessary care. There's a consensus that health care is too expensive and that we get too little for the money. Back pain exemplifies a problem for which we can simultaneously improve quality of care and reduce costs.
Advance Praise
“Richard A. Deyo, MD, is one of the foremost experts in evidence supporting and refuting back pain treatments. He writes with enormous authority on the topic. Here he transforms his knowledge into a readable form for patients. Watch Your Back! also contains enough clinical wisdom to be of value to clinicians and policymakers.”—Jane C. Ballantyne, MD, University of Washington School of Medicine
"We are ultimately responsible for making decisions about our own medical treatments. But when there is no consensus about how to proceed, the best way to make decisions is to be armed with accurate, evidence-based, balanced information. That's why all back pain sufferers and those who care for them--even those who treat them--need to read Dr. Richard A. Deyo's Watch Your Back! Clear, compassionate, independent, fully versed in leading-edge research in the field, Deyo's book is indispensable. He brings decades of clinical practice and research in the field together with a warm but skeptical sensibility and a fierce desire to help those confronted by the difficult and complex phenomenon of back pain. This is a no-nonsense, accessible, vital, timely book."—Floyd Skloot, author of In the Shadow of Memory and Revertigo: An Off-Kilter Memoir
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780801453243 |
| PRICE | $21.95 (USD) |
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