A 1995 New England Journal of Medicine study found bed rest for back pain delays recovery by three to four weeks. Two days of rest may help, but longer periods slow healing. Dr. Aaron Hartman uses this to show how interventions that seem helpful become harmful when overused.
Chapters
Prescribing bed rest for your back pain delays getting better 3 to 4 weeks. Think about that for a second. Yet this was the most common prescription for back pain the doctors doled out in our country. We learned this from studies back in the 1990s, but yet we still recommended doing that for quite some time. Back in 1995, a landmark study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 2 days of bed rest, just taking it easy for a couple days, had a massive impact, and doing it longer actually slowed things down. So basically, it's the idea of a little bit, a little bit is helpful, too much is bad. And we do this commonly in healthcare. We take something that seems a little bit— that, that may help you. Maybe, you know, antibiotics can help with pneumonia, or a little bit of this, or whatever. And all of a sudden we say, if a little bit's good, a lot's better, and actually cause harm. That phenomenon happens all the time in healthcare systems, medications, procedures, things that we think are safe in small amounts, in the right locations, right times. We magnify it and all of a sudden now we're causing harm. We're causing medical error. The atrogenesis, things that we recommend that cause harm, another— that's a fancy term for that. I call them blind spots. They're things in our healthcare system we think are right, they're just plain wrong. Let's get educated about this. We've been talking about these for quite some time. We've talked about dozens of these at this point in time. Just learning about these could literally save your life. So go through our, our reels, our stuff, our, our blogs, as well as our newsletters to find out other medical error, other things that we thought were right that are just plain wrong. And educate yourself about this because it could literally save your life.
