Patient Education

Why Do My Shoes Wear Out More Quickly on the Outside Heel?

On this page: Foot strike: pronation vs. supination How irritated back nerves can lead to supination How to treat foot supination I wear out shoes very quickly. In fact, I’ve worn down one pair of black dress shoes about 50% more on the heel on the outside, so I no longer wear them. Do you…read more

What We Can Learn from a Dead Walking Cat with No Brain

It’s Halloween time, which is a big deal in my house. My wife loves to decorate heavily, and we all get into it as we live in a neighborhood that gets hundreds of kids an hour. At a recent conference, I saw this great video of an old dead-cat experiment, and I thought it was…read more

My Top 7 Tips for Weight Lifting with Back and Neck Pain

I often get asked by back- and neck-pain patients how they should be working out at the gym or with a personal trainer. While there are no published and tested guidelines, what follows is what I have learned through years of trial and error as someone who has both issues and who likes working out.…read more

Lipogems Review: Is This a Fat Stem Cell Procedure?

Lipogems is a fat-processing kit that has gained some popularity the past few years. Near as I can tell, it produces a beautifully cleaned fat graft that is finely chopped. However, many physicians have begun to call this a stem cell procedure. Is that true? What Is Lipogems? Lipogems is a device used to process a…read more

A Patient Saved from a Chiro Amniotic Seminar

You can’t read the paper these days without seeing another ad for a chiropractic clinic advertising a local seminar for amniotic or cord-blood stem cells. It’s ridiculous because there are no living and functional stem cells in the products these practices use, and simply by making the claim of live stem cells, the practice is…read more

Lumbar Fusion Is Usually a Business Model, Not Effective Treatment

Surgical fusion hardware is one of the most successful medical business plans ever devised. You take a screw and rods made for a few dollars in China or India and sell them for thousands of dollars. As a result, we’ve gone from a world where implanting hardware in the spines of patients was rare, to…read more

How to Determine Cell Viability and Vitality

Many physicians and patients get pitched on amniotic and cord “stem cell” products based on a document that purports to show that these cells are “viable”. However, there’s much more to the story than a simple viability percentage. You need to know a lot more to determine if cells are vital and healthy. What Is…read more

Epidural Steroid Side Effects: Repeated Injections Cause Diminishing Relief

On the surface, as a nonsurgical way to relieve pain and inflammation, epidural steroid injections seem like a great idea. However, when we dive beneath the surface, we find that epidural steroid side effects are pretty awful. I’ve observed many times, that for some patients, that while that first shot seems nothing short of miraculous,…read more