When You Wake Up Uncomfortable, What Is Your Next Step?

Good Morning Practice Members! I trust you are having a toasty warm January ….Brrrr!!! It’s been a cold one for this Yankee turned Southerner!! This morning I even woke up to some stiffness/achiness in my low back. (Yes even a chiropractor has aches and pain at times J  )  I am sure many of you have begun your mornings with similar symptoms. [...]

When you wake up uncomfortable, what is your next step? 
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Do you move around, take a walk and see if it loosens up?

Maybe you take a hot shower or, the opposite, use ice. You may have even decided to try and ignore it. 

Or...do you do what many others have done and reach for an NSAID like ibuprofen, Aleve, or Motrin?
We have been conditioned if something doesn’t feel “good”, we must take something to ease the pain, right?  Well, I want to inform my practice members you may want to reconsider how often, how much or how long you take an NSAID. 

A relatively recent article in the May 2017 issue of the British Medical Journal found some pretty alarming results form a study.  This was a good quality study looking at over 446,000 individuals and of those just over 61,000 had a resultant heart attack or myocardial infarct.

The most staggering result was that no matter what dosage was taken for either, 1 week, 1 month or greater than 1 month, all increased the likelihood of a heart attack. Actually the use for greater than 1 month was not much different for risk of a heart attack than the shorter duration use.  
If you took an NSAID for  around 30 days your odds of having a MI was approximately 1.5 times more than those who didn’t take a NSAID.

These results may be why the American College of Physicians has developed new guidelines regarding NSAID use.  They have recommended in the Annals of Internal Medicine to encourage patients who have neck and back pain to try things like heat, manual therapies, spinal manipulation, and acupuncture.

Being that I am in private practice, when discussing these spinal complaints, I still see patients being prescribed or taking NSAID’s as a first line of defense. Hopefully, as this important information gets disseminated to the public, which I believe will happen in due time, we will see a shift in how we handle non-cancerous pain.
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Marc Fondino
PS... Question---when you have had neck, low back  pain---did your pain improve with NSAIDS (Advil, Aleive, Motrin etc)? Respond to this email  as “YES it gets better”or "NO it does not get better" and Jolene will enter your name into a raffle for a complimentary high quality, inflammation battling supplement of your choice (fish oil, magnesium or vitamin D). I will also let you know if I believe you are suffering from chronic inflammation.

Feel free to forward this email to someone you know that also suffers from daily pain and takes NSAIDs.

Thank you!