Available primarily as a pill called Suboxone, this substitute opioid – intended to help individuals struggling with opioid addiction – can be just as lethal as the real thing. Read about it in the New York Times article “Addiction Treatment With a Dark Side.”
California
Redhawk PT, located in the Potrero Hill area of San Francisco, is a physical therapist-owned and -operated business that focuses on personalized care and holistic healing and recovery.
Arizona, Florida, Minnesota
The renowned Mayo Clinic – with locations in Arizona, Florida, and Minnesota – has a Pain Rehabilitation Center (PRC) in Rochester, Minnesota. Three types of outpatient programs aim to restore patients with chronic pain to an active lifestyle: two are designed for adults, a three-week and a two-day program; and the third is a pediatric program for patients between the ages of 13 to young adulthood. The programs involve behavioral therapy, and guide patients toward a medication-free lifestyle.
Ohio
The Cleveland Clinic, in Cleveland, OH – regarded as one of the top 4 hospitals in the US – offers a Chronic Pain Rehabilitation Program with individualized treatment. The program received a Center of Excellence award from the American Pain Society (APS) in 2012.
Nevada
The Las Vegas Recovery Center, run by medical director Mel Pohl, MD, FASAM, offers abstinence-based programs to treat chronic pain and addiction. The Chronic Pain Treatment program is designed to reduce patients’ pain and restore them to functional lifestyles without the use of opiate narcotics.
Washington
The Rehabilitation Institute of Washington in Seattle, WA is a multidisciplinary rehabilitation program led by professionals whose expertise is working with patients with chronic pain, guiding them through rehabilitation intended to restore them to functional health and capabilities. The team at RIW includes physicians, psychologists, physical and occupational therapists, and rehabilitation counselors.
New York
Purely by coincidence, I walked by a doorway in Manhattan and noticed a small sign and a brochure for Attune Holistic Fitness. I’m normally wary of anything labeled “holistic,” a term that doesn’t mean anything in particular, but after a trip up a long flight of stairs, I knew I’d found a gem.
Eva Pelegrin’s sparkling and friendly facility is perfect for rehabilitating a back pain patient – assuming you can make it up those stairs. (She assures me that she has 80-year-old patients flying up them.) I worked out with Pelegrin herself, and I can tell you that she really knows her stuff. She began her career in advertising, but after years of bi-weekly business trips to Europe, she left to become a functional movement specialist. In 2005, she started Attune, determined to focus on all aspects of a client’s health and wellbeing. Attune has other well-trained exercise specialists, bodywork practitioners and acupuncturists on staff as well.
You’re always talking about your “herniated disc,” but what do you really know about it? I interviewed Oxford’s Jill Urban, PhD and learned a lot about these beleaguered bits of tissue.
In the following videos, Dr. Urban gives you the scoop. Watch:
Product: The Serola Sacroiliac Belt
Price: About $40
If you have low back or hip pain or suffer from piriformis syndrome, this may be for you! I’ve found it incredibly helpful when I have to sit in my desk chair for really long hours. It’s a dear friend for your pelvis…especially great if you’re pregnant. (I wish I’d known that, way back when.)
Product: Lumo Lift
Price: $79.99
Lumo Lift is a digital posture coach that provides real-time feedback on your posture as well as the ability to track your progress over time through the Lumo Lift app. Through its gentle and subtle vibrational feedback feature for posture, this wearable tech solution to posture allows users to identify poor posture and correct it as soon as it happens.
Product: BackJoy
Price: $40-$60 depending on the model
I was prowling the aisles and doing some reporting at an ergonomics trade show in Las Vegas when someone leapt out of a booth and handed me an item that looked vaguely like a tractor seat. It was a gift, he assured me, and I should try it.
I put it in my “swag bag” and headed for a lecture by one of ergonomics’ luminaries that was about to start, in the ballroom at Caesar’s Palace. The chairs, lined up in rows, might have been okay for resting between dances at a wedding, but for listening to a lecture, they were incredibly uncomfortable.
I tried my usual remedies—shoving my rolled-up jacket behind me, sitting sideways, and lolling like a teenager in a boring math class. Nothing helped. Then I remembered: I had a BackJoy in my bag. I peeled the plastic wrapping (not unquietly) off and placed it beneath me.
The BackJoy is essentially an orthotic for your butt, making it impossible for your sitting bones to sink into the chair or for your sacrum to sag. I couldn’t believe it: the hellish chair was suddenly perfectly okay. In time, I discovered that a BackJoy could make any chair anywhere—even a bench at a sporting event in the freezing wind—into acceptable seating. I take it with me whenever I know there’s a long sit in my future. Understandably, every single time I go through security, the TSA guy or gal, who must perch for hours on a stool, asks me many detailed questions about it. I have never gotten one of them to stop using their fancy flashlight long enough to try it.
Texas
Tom Mayer runs one of the oldest – and the best – functional rehabilitation programs in the U.S. With a return-to-work focus, P.R.I.D.E (Productive Rehabilitation Institute of Dallas for Ergonomics) reconditions back pain sufferers, aids with withdrawal from opioid narcotics, and addresses psychological concerns.
Austria, Australia, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland
This no-nonsense website is an excellent resource for preventative and therapeutic strength training. Their slogan? “A strong back knows no pain.” They have locations worldwide, and will conduct a free first personal session to lay out your situation and your training goals.
Can you tell your butt from your back? Read this article at SaveYourself, a website of advice for aches, pains and injuries, to find out how to tell what’s really hurting.
Washington
Dr. Stanley A. Herring is a clinical professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, in the departments of Rehabilitation Medicine, Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine, and Neurological Surgery. Though he specializes in sports-medicine (working on a team of physicians for the Seattle Seahawks and the Seattle Mariners), his expertise is also in non-operative musculoskeletal medicine and disorders of the spine.
Oregon
The Oregon Health & Science University in Beaverton, OR (essentially Portland) developed this Orthopaedics & Rehabilitation Clinic at Cornell West to address sports medicine, spine care, joint care (along with knee, hip, shoulder, elbow, and hand care), pediatric care, X-ray and imaging, and physical therapy and rehabilitation. The clinic has thirteen primary providers, each with their specialty, but almost all have rehabilitation as an area of expertise.
Anyone with a four-legged friend knows the ache of stooping to pick up after him/her – not to mention the messy accidents that can happen even with the inside-out-bag method. With Clean-Pick, you can not only avoid “handling” your dog’s business yourself – but you barely have to bend to attend to it. The contraption is at once a leash, a bag dispenser, and a mechanical hand to use instead of your own to perform this duty.
India
If you’re unfamiliar with the healing principles of ayurveda, the system of alternative medicine (rather, traditional medicine, according to Sanskrit culture) based on maintaining an equilibrium between the human body’s three doshas, this post on Srikant Nair’s blog will walk you through some of the basic principles of ayurveda and how they relate, specifically, to back pain. (Nair established the Kerala Ayurvedic Center called Ayuryog in Vadodara, India, which offers consultations and treatments in keeping with the traditional medicine.)
ACE, the American Council on Exercise, sponsored a study in 2007 that assessed the effects of functional fitness rehabilitation programs, aimed to help older adults remain active and independent as they age. The results were decidedly positive: read a writeup on the study, which details examples of the kinds of exercises the participants performed and tracks changes over the course of the study. The website also has a trainer search function so you can get started with a fitness program.
New York
Dr. Alex Moroz is the director of the Integrative Musculoskeletal Program at NYU’s Langone Medical Center. He specializes in rehabilitative medicine, particularly in back, neck, and joint rehabilitation, as well as acupuncture. On his personal website you can find photos, news, and articles about and written by Dr. Moroz.
