Back To Life

Up to 80 percent of Americans will experience serious back pain at some point, but the agony doesn’t have to last. Tara Narula, MD, reports on the movement that’s helping people stand tall.

DEBORAH’S BACK PAIN seemed to come out of nowhere. One day the then-51-year-old New Yorker was sprinting from meeting to meeting; a few weeks later, she was struggling even to get dressed. She suffered from a constant, sharp sciatic pain that started in her lower back and radiated down her right leg. Laughing hurt. Sneezing hurt. Movement of almost any kind was agonizing. Standard doses of over-the-counter medication like ibuprofen brought no relief. Deborah started using a cane to get around and avoided making plans with friends. “I’d never been in that much pain for that long,” she says. “I got to the point where I would have done or taken anything to make it stop.”

A month in, Deborah called her primary care physician, who prescribed oxycodone. To her surprise, it did nothing for her, so she stopped taking it and, after consulting with her doctor and pharmacist, tried a prescription dose of Advil instead. This helped, but not enough. She feared that surgery was her only hope for functioning normally again.

Then Deborah’s primary care physician referred her to Christopher Visco, MD, a physiatrist and sports medicine doctor at New York- Presbyterian Hospital who specializes in spine injuries. (“A psychiatrist?” said Deborah, at first misunderstanding Visco’s specialty. “It’s not my head, it’s my back!”) Visco had the “secret sauce of a good doctor”: He listened to every detail of Deborah’s story before offering advice.