Let’s consider the case of Louie.  His spine is the picture on the left.  Compare his neck to the one on the right (normal healthy cervical spine).  For many decades Louie has had these severe bone spurs and degenerated spinal discs.  His neck is abnormally straight and tilted forward.  By any doctor's objective evaluation, Louie's neck is a mess!  It looks ghastly on the inside.  If Louie suffered from chronic neck pain, it would be no surprise for any doctor to tell him: “Well Louie, you have severe degenerative disc disease and spurs the size of Alaska… no wonder you’re in pain… you’re only choice is surgery, painkillers, steroid injections or just deal with it.”

But here's the catch:

Louie's neck DOESN'T hurt... It has NEVER hurt...  He has NO pain!




“At age 86, my spine is loaded with arthritic degeneration—bone spurs almost as big as the bones themselves… but NO PAIN!  Most doctors would look at my neck x-rays and say "I can't believe your neck doesn't hurt...  It just goes to show you that arthritis isn't all it's cracked up to be"  
                                                                                                - Louis Markbreit, Atlas Orthogonal patient

  It is simply INACCURATE to blame neck pain on degenerative disc disease, commonly called neck arthritis.  Doctors appear to diagnose arthritis as the cause of pain way too often.

    The lesson to be learned here is that if a doctor has told you that the x-rays show arthritis or degenerative disc disease; this doesn't mean that it's the cause of your pain.

    It also doesn't mean there's no physical treatment that can help it.  

    And it doesn't mean that you have to take "arthritis" medicine to get out of pain.  You don't "have to" do anything.  And I say you shouldn't until you've really explored all your treatment options.  

    Plus, if you've been discouraged by a doctor regarding "alternative" treatments for arthritis pain, you might want to consider that so-called "mainstream" medical practitioners may not have any experience helping arthritis sufferers WITHOUT drugs...

   Got Vioxx?

    Mainstream arthritis treatment boomed with the FDA's 1999 approval of Vioxx.  But then, FDA analysts estimated that Vioxx caused between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks, 30 to 40 percent of which were probably fatal, in the five years the drug was on the market.

    Merck Pharmaceuticals withdrew Vioxx from the market in September of 2004.  They had sales revenue of $2.5 BILLION the year prior to the withdrawal.

    Is this acceptable health care?  You be the judge.      

    There are many drugless and non-surgical treatments used throughout the world that help.  I use many of them in my practice.  There are many great ways to treat the same condition.  

    MY ADVICE: "Run for the hills" from any health care professional that tells you THEIR treatment is the ONLY option.  True emergency medical situations are of course, the exception to this rule.

Let's face it - there are ECONOMIC motivations for diagnosing and treating arthritis.  Before the deadly drug, Vioxx was mercifully removed from the market (over 50,000 people died from its use!), it generated many billions of dollars in sales annually.