Ben Greenfield talks with a guest about why steroids and injections for back pain can backfire. They numb your body's warning signals, so you move wrong and cause more damage once the medication wears off.
But there's a back pain expert out there, you might know better than me, who kind of makes that argument that a lot of back pain, for example, is in your head.
Yeah, well, I don't know who you're specifically talking about. It could be Per Nicholson. I'm not sure. But yeah, I mean, I tell my patients all the time because they want the pain to go away, obviously, and that's the goal of when I'm treating them. But it's not always immediate. But they want it to go away right now because they have to go to work and things like that. So they want to take the medications or they want, you know, if they have, like a bulging or herniated disc, they want to take the steroid or the pain injection. And I'm telling them all the time that, yes, those things are fine in the short term if you have that much pain and you need to get rid of it. But when you dull a pain signal like that, pain signal is your body's way of saying, hey, something's wrong. Well, guess what? That drug or injection is going to wear off one day. And now it may be worse because you never got the feedback of your body saying, don't do this.
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