Top 5 Ways to Immedicately Reduce Back Pain

As you know by now, I suffer from a variety of back pain maladies including degenerative disc disease and spinal stenosis. To treat my pain, I have been exploring a variety of ways to reduce the pain through conservative treatments. For the last month I have focused on the following to much success

1) Maintain a healthy posture: I had a physical therapist actual tape me into a good posture and lived like that for three days. You would not believe the impact proper posture had on my neck pain. He also had me provide additional lumbar support with a rolled up towel every time I sat down. The combination were fantastic.

2) Lose Weight: Yes ladies and gentlemen having a gut is a terrible thing for low back pain. I have lost 10 lbs and probably have another 25 to go, but I already feel like its having an impact

3) Improve the ergonomics of your work environment. Make sure your computer screen is eye level and that you have a good chair that is set appropriately for you. Take a look at SpineUniverse's ergonomics articles for how to best structure your work environment. I am convinced my neck pain is directly related to having a lap top for the last decade.

4) Stretch: Every day I do 3 stretches. Lay on your back and pull your knee to your chest, hold it for 20 seconds. the switch legs and repeat 3 times. It gives an excellent low impact stretch in the lower back. The second stretch I do also requires laying on your back. I then stick one leg straight up in the air and gently pull it towards me, keeping my leg straight. This is an excellent hamstring stretch. The last stretch is difficult to explain. I got all three stretches at back stretches.

5) Heating pad for degenerative disc disease: Every night before I go to bed I put a heating pad on my back for 5 minutes. I am told this help increase blood flow to the degenerated disc.

I have found the combination of these five tools has help reduce my back pain. While I still suffer from some pain it has diminished enough to where I can avoid surgery for the time being.

When the road gets tough, remeber the mission statement

I thought I would share an email I sent to my organization today. I have mentioned in previous blogs that we are in hyper-growth mode and moving extremely fast. I believe very strongly that when you get into this mode its important to frequently stop and ask yourself, why are we doing this? At the end of the day, despite pressures to grow revenue, we need to do one thing extremely well: provide the most respected and comprehensive spine education available anywhere, online or off. I believe we are on the way to achieving this and if we do, the revenue growth will follow. If we don't we will never be able to build a sustainable business.

Here is how I framed it internally:

"Let’s face it, between travel and workload we are moving 100 miles per hour right now. Couple the pace with the pressure to hit our aggressive revenue & expense targets and it makes for a head to the grindstone work day.

While we continue these herculean efforts, it’s important we all take a step back to remember our primary mission:

To improve the quality of care for individuals with spinal disorders and more common causes of back pain.

We do this by creating the most up to date and accurate education and information on the spine.

I believe very strongly that as long as we conduct ourselves with this in mind the long term growth prospects of this company are tremendous. Therefore I ask that we be especially cognizant of our ultimate mission as we struggle to meet deadlines, deliver results for advertisers and grow revenue. While each of those three objectives are critically important to the life of our organization, ultimately they do not matter if we do not fulfill our primary mission.

So keep up the great work and in the words of Ethan Ash [SpineUniverse VP of Sales & Marketing]: “ At SpineUniverse we got your back.”

Warmest Regards,

Bill Paquin

Treating Degenerative Disc Disease: My Story

We have established how ironic it is that I discover I have degenerative disc disease 5 months after accepting the position as CEO of SpineUniverse, but is there an opportunity here to turn this negative into a positive for both myself and others suffering from the disease.

What a great opportunity to use myself as a guinea pig for the treatment options available to someone with a degenerated L5/S1 disc.

Last week I saw the orthopedic surgeon I found through SpineUniverse. He's a well-respected surgeon 10 minutes from my house, and after an MRI, he is the one who gave me the diagnosis. His suggestion was to do what I can to alleviate the pain through non-surgical treatments like physical therapy, but he expects at some point I will need surgery. He also suggested I see a neurologist for the pins and needles in my hands and feet since an L5/S1 degeneration should not be causing pins and needles in my hands.

I am going to follow his recommendation and see both, as well as, as many other related specialists as possible. I want to avoid surgery at all costs.

This week I plan on seeing the following:
1) Physical Therapist
2) Neurologist (just in case the tingling in my feet and hands is not from the degenerated disc
3) Chiropractor
4) Pain Specialist

Next week I see:
1) Personal trainer who does functional movement (expect a post next week discussing functional movement. My trainer, Eric D'Agati, performs functional movement screening for the NY Giants to help reduce injuries Eric's website )
2) Acupuncture
3) Nutritionist (I want to lose weight. Most people don't realize losing weight is the first thing we should be doing to reduce lower back pain

I recommend checking out this article to learn more about the effects of weight on the spine. Weight & Back Pain Article

I plan to keep all of you in the loop on my progress, including what works for me and what doesn't.

Talk to you soon.

BP

The Sports Illustrated Curse holds nothing to SpineUniverse

I never had back pain.

Until, that is, I joined SpineUniverse. It turns out I have a degenerated disk L5 / S1 and it may require spine surgery.

You might say one person does not a curse make. To which I would add...

1. Our lead investor herniated his disc within 8 weeks of closing our Series A
2. Our VP of Sales discovers his wife has degenerative disc disease AND
   
3. A close family friend died at 29 after a spinal tumor ruptured his spinal cord last month
4. One of our editors had a motorcycle fall on her husband causing multiple fractures to both his lumbar and cervical spine
5. Our SEO guru's brother requires spine surgery
   

In follow-up to a previous post. I still have not gotten the results of the PT evaluation I took in July. Partially due to how busy we are re-launching the company and partially due to my complete lack of curiosity on how to fix myself. However, with this new diagnosis I plan to aggressively pursue non-surgical treatments before trying something like fusion or disc replacement. I even started using the elliptical again.

Thankfully I have the best surgeons in the country on the case. It pains me to think of the every day individuals with limited knowledge and limited resources to get, not just the right diagnosis, but the best treatment for where they are in their treatment algorithm.

The good news is this experience provides a tremendous level of insight into the plight of our visitors. You can't pay for that type of understanding. Well actually, I am paying quite a bit for it, but you know what I mean.

Next steps are to send the MRI to another surgeon for a second opinion, meet with a PT and schedule a neurology appointment to try and explain some tingling in my hands that seem to be a separate issue from the back.

Talk to you soon.

BP

Launching a new site

Its been about a week since my last post as we have been rolling up our sleeves in an effort to launch new branding and site design for http://www.spineuniverse.com/. It reminds me of when my wife asked me to put a new toilet in our master bathroom then turning around 3 days later with the whole bathroom gutted.

Having finalized a new logo and brand, I am struggling with which ad server to choose. Do we customize an open source solution which is catered to our needs or choose one of the major products on the market like the 24/7 openstream product or DoubleClick's Dart?

Given the size of SpineUniverse I am leaning towards the 24/7 solution rather than overtaxing our internal team any more. Either way it will be an improvement over the existing capabilities, but one is thousands of dollars and one essentially free.

We are constantly trying to balance expense & work load. Despite the money we raised this March, which gives us plenty of cash by which to grow, we are pushing for break even this fall, six months sooner than originally forecasted and in a way that does not limit future growth, so an out of box solution has some value despite being more expensive.

Ah the balancing act of a small venture backed business.

I'll get you the details of my evaluation in the next post. I am off to an ad server demo from 24/7.

Warmest,

BP

Picking up my son

Last week I spent some time at the beach, building castles with my 2 year old and generally trying to keep the stresses of building a small company at bay. My son asked to be picked up and as I bent over to grab him a shooting pain went up and down my spine. Since that moment I have had a localized pain in my lower back which progressed yesterday to a burning / pins and needles sensation in my legs.

Now your probably saying "this is awfully convenient given his role with SpineUniverse", but I can assure you, while I am moderately out of shape, I have never had a back problem until I took this role.

The point is I now find myself avoiding situations where I have to pick up my son. It is really frustrating and sad, and it makes me think of the other 80 million Americans with back pain. How many of them are moms and dads that now have to struggle through the pain and/or cut back on how they play and interact with their children.

While I have been in health for almost a decade building education for HIV, Diabetes and Cancer patients/physicians, I am shocked at the impact of severe back pain on family life. Of course almost 80% of back pain will diminish in 6-8 weeks, especially when rest is coupled with improved nutrition, core strengthening, weight loss and elimination of smoking from ones list of habits, but the other 20% is debilitating with a significant impact on your frame of mind.

(point of note: In spine surgery related clinical studies it has been shown that smokers do not heal as easily as non-smokers - so stop smoking if you need spine surgery)

Alas, today I am going to a physical therapist to evaluate my back and my back pain. Stay tuned for future posts where I will invite you to experience my efforts to reduce the pain in an attempt to return to my normal way of interacting with my son.

My "back pain" goals for the next week:
1) Start diet and get on the path to lose 15 lbs
2) Increase exercise from none to 3/4 days per week - improve core strength
3) See a physical therapist an a pcp for my back pain

Days living with back pain - 7

See you next post

Bill

Some thoughts on "Back Pain & Your Health"

Welcome to Back Pain & Your Health. This blog is an outgrowth of my efforts to launch a venture-backed spine focused health portal and the personal experiences surrounding this journey. For the past 6 years I have been committed to building companies that are improving the quality of patient care both in the US and abroad. With my recent appointment, I am finally in a position to run a company according to the vision uniqiue to my 35 years of experiences. I am hoping my mistakes and successes can help others with a similar desire to blend entrepreneurship and the public good.

To be frank, I am under no illusions that I have anything particularly brilliant or innovative to say that can not be found anywhere else, but what you will find is brutal honesty and the kind of talk born from a large and loud NJ Italian family. I intend to share with you the mistakes, shortcomings and internal dialogue behind my efforts to build SpineUniverse into a valuable resource for people with chronic pain and spinal diseases.

With that being said, while our particular niche is the spine and chronic pain, I believe our approach to medical education extends beyond our specific set of conditions and treatments to the broader population.

In the upcoming weeks I will begin to catalog:

• The inequities and inefficiencies in our healthcare system
• Models for improving the way individuals manage their health
• The need for a proactive and preventative self-managed approach to healthcare
• The trials of entrepreneurship: the ups, the downs and the absurdly frustrating
• Our efforts to launch a medical education company
• My own struggle to implement preventative strategies for reducing my own back pain

Each of these themes will be supported by interviews, case studies and personal experiences speaking as an individual not as CEO of SpineUniverse.

Expect a post once or twic per week. I hope you join me for the ride.

Warm Regards,

Bill Paquin