Back Pain vs. Big Pharma

By Dr. Steven Warfield

Turn on the television to any station and it won’t be long before you see a commercial touting one kind of 

prescription drug or another.  That isn’t unusual since the drug industry spent $2.4 billion in television advertising last year alone, down from a high of $3.1 billion in 2007.  Prior to 1997, drugmakers were prohibited from promoting their products on television. This usually meant that consumers would rely on doctors to make judgments regarding the most appropriate medications to prescribe.  Since that date, however this equation has been turned on its head.

In a recent editorial, Ian Spatz, a former vice president for global health policy at Merck, says doctors feel pressured to prescribe the drugs patients request. And critics say the ads push consumer to ask their doctors for expensive branded drugs, driving up the cost of healthcare. 



Don’t get me wrong, being a chiropractor means sometimes co-managing pain medication with primary care physicians and pain management to provide pain relief to patients.  The chief difference is that medication alone is never given as a solution to back pain.  It should be viewed as a tool for temporary relief while the underlying causes are being treated.  A number of prescription pain killers have been known to induce dependency.  Even worse is the sad fact that there are many prescription drugs that are not only prohibitively expensive, but they can have adverse side effects that in some cases can be worse than the condition they are being used to treat. 

Big Pharma recently began promoting Humira, an expensive drug with a price tag of nearly 20,000 dollars a year. Humira is touted to help treat ankylosing spondylitis, a chronic inflammatory disease of the axial skeleton, which includes the spine. It is outrageous how drug companies promote this dangerous drug for an exceedingly rare cause of low back pain – one that is only responsible for less than a tenth of a tenth of one percent of low back pain! What’s more, Humira may cause severe side effects, such as:

•     Tuberculosis

•     Increased risk of lymphoma and other cancers

•     Hepatitis B infection

•     Liver, nervous system, and blood problems

•     Heart failure

•     Immune reactions, such as lupus-like syndrome

Opioid painkillers like OxyContin, which are also commonly prescribed for back pain relief, also have a highly addictive nature. In fact, opioids are among the most commonly abused prescription drugs today. This is why back pain is now one of the primary reasons why so many American adults get addicted to painkillers. 

The next time you experience back pain, before you reach for the medicine cabinet you need to be aware of the fact that pain relievers only provide temporary relief.  Their only role is to mask pain.  They do not address the underlying causes.  When one considers that eighty percent of Americans are affected by back pain at one time in their lives or another, then this condition is not only a serious threat to health in this country, it is a chronic condition that costs far more in lost income than mere medical expenses can account.  

While accidents and injury account for about half of the patients that seek chiropractic treatment, a number of other factors including obesity, poor posture and lifestyle accounts for the other half.  If you work in an office, everything from the position of your computer monitor to your office chair can act to imbalance your spine and its underlying musculature to cause pain.  If you are overweight or pregnant, this can also put undue stress on your spine that can result in pain.

The best way to overcome these problems is to treat the underlying issues.  From a chiropractic standpoint this starts with an examination (followed in some cases by an x-ray) in order to pinpoint the affected areas.  After this and depending upon the results of the examination, treatment can begin.  This can consist of a spinal adjustment, ultrasound therapy, laser treatment or other rehabilitation treatment modalities that are designed to restore normal biomechanics and in so doing attenuate pain.  More importantly, chiropractic care does not stop there.  Depending upon the injury and its underlying cause, your chiropractor can also advise you on everything from exercise regimens and dietary changes, to posture and lifestyle modification designed to keep the underlying causes of pain from repeating themselves.

The effects of Chiropractic care are much longer lasting and do not to adversely affect your health.  The problem is that unlike Big Pharma, chiropractors do not spend billions of dollars per year on television commercials designed to entice the public into trying our services.  We rely on getting results and word of mouth from patients whose quality of life has been enhanced by seeking us out.  And that’s priceless.

Dr.’s Steven Warfield and Dave Edenfield offer the most advanced treatments for back pain, sciatica, neck pain, whiplash and headaches. They also treat auto accident victims with state-of-the-art technologies. For more information visit http://www.lakewoodchiropracticjax.com/