How About a Dose of Empowerment for Your Next Chronic Back Pain Patient? (Video)

We here at Cleveland Clinic see a huge number of chronic pain patients… These patients are often maybe mismanaged and/or could be managed in a more effective manner. We have developed a program to help deal with a small subset of this patient population, the early, chronic low-back pain patients, and trying to get them to a better place to manage their pain themselves from a non-surgical, minimizing-medicine perspective. The program is called the ‘Back on TREK’ program. It is appropriate for many people who have relatively early but chronic pain, and the pain’s been around for over several months, and they see no way out. Nothing has worked: injections, medications, etc., have not worked for them. When it is deemed by us that they don’t need surgery or other procedures… we try to get them into a program that causes them to be empowered to take care of their own pain problem. What often happens is we deal with passive patients, people who want to be healed… What we try to do is shift this empowerment… where the patient is trying to empower the physician to treat them, and we try to reverse that process and cause the patient to be empowered to treat themselves.