Now, we know better.

Leave a comment March 20, 2018 drworobec

This is a tale of my mom, and of advances in research and medical treatment.

Maya Angelou famously said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” This statement can be readily applied to scientific advances in patient care, and in the case of my mother, low back pain.

In the 1980s, when my brother and I were very young, my mom suffered from chronic low back pain. There was no incident that started her pain, per se, but it was a dull ache that developed into chronic pain over the years. She was diagnosed with “degenerative disc disease,” and in 1988 had aggressive back surgery, whereby the surgeon fused four of her five lumbar vertebrae together via screws and an eight-inch metal rod. I have vague memories of visiting her in recovery in an Edmonton hospital, a few hour’s drive from our tiny prairie town of Hughenden, Alberta. My nine-year-old brain didn’t hold on to many of the details, just that she was in a hospital bed, and I’d never seen my invincible mother, well, not invincible.

She recovered well, and her low back pain was a thing of the past through my ego-centric teenage and young adult years. And while her history of back pain and surgery didn’t play a conscious role in my decision to become a chiropractor, the irony is not lost on me that I treat patients like her pre-surgical self every day. I could have helped her, and let me boldly state that she might have avoided back surgery. You see, she had no radiculopathy (pain down the leg due to pressure on a lumbar spinal nerve), no indicators of disc bulges or herniations, and she was only 38 years old, coincidentally the exact same age that I am now.

However, her back pain is back with a vengeance now, thirty years later. It’s worsened over the last several years, and she now has trouble being on her feet or sitting for prolonged periods of time, and struggles to lift much more than her youngest 21-lb granddaughter. It’s affecting her quality of life, despite regular rehab exercises guided by yours truly, ergonomic modifications, and other conservative treatment measures. The thing is, for the last thirty years, her body has compensated for the lack of movement through her lumbar spine, and the segments above and below her fusion now show advanced degeneration. Her movement patterns have changed, her core muscles have changed, her biomechanics have changed. Her spine does not move well, and as a cumulative result, she is in pain much of the time.

She’ll tell you she feels lucky. Lucky that her pain was mostly gone for the last thirty years. Lucky that the post-surgical ramifications haven’t affected her much until now. But I’ll tell you that I wish she didn’t have chronic low back pain in the 1980s, because the conservative management today would be far different.

Why do I tell you this? Because now, we know better. Now, we do better. And we are really good at treating low back pain.

This is similar to my mom’s spinal surgery in 1988, although four of her five lumbar vertebrae are involved.

*** As an aside, I never use the term “Degenerative Disc Disease” as a diagnosis because I think the term creates fear-mongering and patient helplessness. Words spoken by a medical professional carry power, a power that I do not take lightly. Improved semantics = improved patient outcomes. And might I remind you that there is not always a correlation between clinic imaging results and a patient’s symptomatology…..

Do one thing every day that scares you

Leave a comment April 3, 2017 drworobec

You know those things in life that scare you? Those times when it would be far easier to play it safe and stick with what you know, rather than venturing out into the uncertainty of the unknown? Well, I’ve got a few of those times going on in my life right now. I love a challenge, and I’ve thrown myself into some exciting potential career opportunities and I’ve also set my sights on a lofty personal athletic goal. Both of these things scare me. To death. But I’m sure that you know, as well as I, that those are precisely the times when we grow.

Luck is where opportunity meets preparation, right?

Aug/2002; at the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College (CMCC) in Toronto.

One of the scariest things I’ve ever done was to move across the country to get my Chiropractic degree in Toronto. That was 2002, and my twenty-two year-old self knew exactly no one in Southern Ontario. But I took the plunge, and that spring-boarded me to meeting my husband, many of my best friends, and a career that I love. It was a defining moment in my life, and one that changed my trajectory completely.

Nov/2007; signing the lease at my new clinic space.

Another pivotal, yet terrifying decision, was selling my clinic in 2010. I simply couldn’t be everything to everyone; and although the choice to sell the clinic I’d built from nothing and focus on my young son and my family’s priorities was the right one, it was both intimidating and life-changing. Ultimately, that’s what brought me here, to Burlington Sports & Spine Clinic, where I’ve found the perfect fit.

So, what’s ambition?

What’s courage?

May you have both. Do one thing every day that scares you, they say? I say you should also do one thing every so often that terrifies you.

“and your back pain is going to go away”

Leave a comment January 23, 2017 drworobec

“You know what really helped me?” a patient recently said during her second treatment with me. “The fact that you told me that my back wasn’t going to go out.”

I hear this type of thing often. This particular patient was suffering with lower back pain, and had a previous history of an exceptionally debilitating episode that made her temporarily unable to care for her two young children. Her fear level was high. On her first visit to the clinic, I spent much of our time together talking with her, explaining what was happening to her back, and why she was having pain. Patient education is patient empowerment. I did some hands-on manual therapy and then we chatted about rehabilitation exercises and the importance of movement, something that people in pain tend to avoid. The last words I said to her before she left were along the lines of “don’t worry, you’re going to be fine, and your back pain is going to go away.” A huge part of my job is patient education, because knowledge is power.

And just so that we’re all on the same page moving forward, backs don’t “go out” and then “go back in,” running does not cause arthritis in your knees, and getting adjusted three times a week for the rest of your life will not prevent stage three spinal degeneration. Yet these are all proclamations that patients come in and tell me about themselves; these blanket statements are untrue and damaging, and in most cases, patients have been told these things by a health professional. As chiropractors, and certainly as all healthcare providers, we cannot underestimate the power of our words for the good and for the bad. If you have a patient’s trust and respect, you have the power to remarkably alter the course of their healing and the perception of their body’s abilities through your words alone.

This is the same reason that medical imaging can often be detrimental; because it affects a patient’s psyche. Did you know that in many cases, there is actually a very poor correlation between what is shown on a medical image (an X-ray, for example) and a patient’s symptomatology? But if a patient is shown an x-ray of “degenerative joint disease” (that’s a fancy term for arthritis) in their spine, they will come to believe that they have an arthritic, incapable, dysfunctional body. This person then tends to become fearful of movement and therefore moves less. And what creates a perfect storm for unhealthy joints? Lack of movement. Herein lies the problem.

Healthcare professionals: please do be careful with your words, and patients: please do be careful of what you listen to.