Overview

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.

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9780801453243

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Reviews

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

(Starred Review) Deyo (Oregon Health and Science Univ., Hope or Hype) methodically looks at the most frequently used methods of diagnosis and treatment and finds the evidence often lacking, negative, or distorted. With no stake in any particular treatment, the author cites numerous research studies, quotes experts he has interviewed, and provides anecdotes about sufferers, including President John F. Kennedy and Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School Jerome Groopman. The author's consistent message is that there is no magic bullet, that more isn't always better, and that patients should be informed partners in any decision. VERDICT Concise, clearly written, and evidence based, Deyo's work would be invaluable to those facing the onset of back pain and the dizzying range of treatment choices, as well as to practitioners and policy makers.-Richard Maxwell, Library Journal (10/15/2014) 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 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 Watch Your Back! is chock-full of disturbing truths. Most of us will have back pain and-if we get in a scanner-most of us will have abnormalities found in our back. While the pain and abnormalities frequently have nothing to do with each other, their coexistence produces a lot of patients for surgeons to operate on. And even if you don't buy into surgery, there are hundreds of other options being sold. What a mess. Luckily, Dr. Deyo has got your back! -H. Gilbert Welch, MD, MPH, author of Overdiagnosed Richard A. Deyo, MD, masterfully weaves together the science, business, and politics of treatment for an ailment that has bedeviled humankind throughout recorded history. He tells the human story of America's best and brightest, President John F. Kennedy among them, who succumbed to interventions that caused more harm than good. Watch Your Back! is a page-turner guide for the afflicted and those who seek to help them heal. -Rosemary Gibson, author of The Treatment Trap Richard A. Deyo, MD, tells the appalling, infuriating, and in the end just plain outrageous tale of how money and poor science helped turn the United States into the back surgery capital of the world. This book is essential reading for anybody with a spinal column. -Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated In Watch Your Back!, renowned physician and researcher Richard A. Deyo tackles the formidable problem of back pain from every angle, repudiating most expensive and dangerous high-tech approaches. Dr. Deyo sensibly advocates greater patient autonomy and confirms the efficacy of low-cost alternative therapies such as exercise and yoga. -Loren Fishman, MD, medical director of Manhattan Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and author of Healing Yoga

Author Information

Richard A. Deyo, MD, is Professor of Family Medicine, Professor of Internal Medicine, and Professor of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Oregon Health and Science University. Winner of the Wiltse Lifetime Achievement Award given by the International Society for the Study of the Lumbar Spine, he is coauthor of Hope or Hype: The Obsession with Medical Advances and the High Cost of False Promises.

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