Pain Management

(Video Transcript)

Hi, my name is John and I’m here at Dr. Paul Braadt’s office for an appointment and I wanted to–I volunteered to–aid him in any way that I could to spread the good word about what he’s doing.

My knowledge of Dr. Braadt had been interrupted by about a year and a half. It’s only been in the last month or thereabouts that I started coming back to his office. Prior to that for perhaps a year and a half I was, at the direction of my family doctor, going to pain management at the Lehigh Valley Hospital just down the street here on Cedar Crest. And during that initial time that I knew Dr. Braadt, as my wife reminded me, I was not on any kind of pain medications. It was strictly Dr. Braadt’s manipulation and treatment that led to a relatively pain-free time for my lower back.

My family doctor wanted me to go to pain management. So, believing in him, I did that and there at pain management I was, I could say, subjected to or introduced to a variety of treatments–some of them physical, many of them pharmaceutical. We started off with subdural injections in the spine and I had three of those. One helped for a couple of weeks. One helped for maybe an hour or two and one didn’t help at all.

From there we went to a discussion–and that didn’t happen overnight–we’re talking about over a period of perhaps a half year. We went to a discussion of something called a rhizotomy. A…what’s the term of the bone Paul? A facet rhizotomy. And in that procedure they insert what I refer to as horse needles in your spine–rather good sized rascals–with big thick wires attached to them that go to a machine that generates a radio frequency. And after the placement of this needle is made…they know the placement by the level of pain you tell them that you have…and when it hurts pretty good that’s when they stop going in. That one, you might say, that needle is set in position.

So, after they did six of these babies on my spine they turned on the radio frequency and supposedly burned the nerves. That’s the technique: to burn the nerves. You burn the nerves, you have no nerves, you have no pain. And unfortunately in my case, although I was led to believe it was eighty-five percent successful with any population of humans, I was in that other fifteen percent that had no effect at all. In fact, it was worse after the procedure than it was before, due to the trauma that was suffered by my lower back with these large needles and the radio frequency.

At about that time I said, “What are we going to do now, surgery?” And they said, “No. You’re not a candidate for surgery. We’ll treat you pharmaceutically and we’ll start now with this drug and that drug, etc.” And I said, “Is there any problem…you have a problem if I go back to my chiropractor while we’re doing this?” And they said, “No. Go right ahead and do that.” I did.

And as I said in the introduction, I’ve been here now for this visit–this sequence–perhaps a month and a half. And as I explained to Dr. Braadt–with no economic incentive offered, just strictly one human being trying to help another that’s doing great job–the pain that I didn’t have last night after my procedure with him was quite noticeable. Unmistakable. I’m a believer in what he does. There is no doubt in my mind that it helps. And if it helps me, it’s apt to help most people.