Home Treatment for Repetitive Stress Injury

I’ll never forget the day my Workers’ Comp doctor gave me a packet of Vioxx pain killer to try, after the drug had been pulled from the market.

I told him, “I want to heal my arms, not just numb the pain.” Although he admitted that I could hurt myself more by numbing the pain and working through it, he told me to just take the pills the next time I found myself in too much pain to get through a day.

How many doctors prescribe pain-killers and placebos, instead of dealing with the cause of the problem? According to a recent New York Times study, half of all doctors give their patients placebos, especially for problems they suspect are psychosomatic, or when they don’t know how else to deal with “difficult” patients. Those placebos usually aren’t inert, but may include vitamins, headache pills, even antibiotics or sedatives.

“The problem is that most of those people [with fibromyalgia, etc.] are very difficult patients, and it’s a whole lot easier to give them something like a big dose of Aleve,” he [Dr. William Schreiber, an internist] said. “Is that a placebo treatment? Depending on how you define it, I guess it is.”

The fact that doctors write off “difficult” patients by giving them placebos, not careful attention, says more about the medical establishment’s failures than the patient’s “psychosomatic” state of mind. Of course many patients who have chronic, lingering pain also have psychological effects such as depression, despair or anxiety, and they don’t have the medical training to ID the problem.

Difficulties like fibromyalgia, tendonitis, epicondylitis and more are far more subtle to identify and heal than something acute like a broken bone. But it’s not the patient’s job to walk into the doctor’s office and identify the problem — that’s up to the doctor. If doctors can’t find the problem, maybe they should refer the patient to someone who can.

There are some positive results about the use of placebos, at least — they’re as effective as anti-depressants, and sometimes effective on pain.

clinical trials have hinted that placebos may have powerful effects. Some 30 percent to 40 percent of depressed patients who are given placebos get better, a treatment effect that antidepressants barely top. Placebos have also proved effective against hypertension and pain.

I would hazard an uneducated guess that if pain patients are treated with a pill, they feel more relaxed, and less stress also leads to less tension and pain (especially if the placebo is a painkiller;)

But here’s another news flash — it may be more effective to treat hypertension and pain patients, and depressive patients too, with alternatives to drugs. Yoga, meditation, strength training, acupuncture, and mindfulness training are all proven and effective strategies that will go further than pain-killers and vitamin supplements in reducing stress, and resulting in a stronger body too. Antibiotics and sedatives, on the other hand, are only going to cause secondary problems.

Clearly, doctors don’t have all the answers in treating pain problems. It’s time for consumers to start standing up for their own rights and asking their doctors some tough questions.

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