Dr. Joshua John-Ram Schacter explains how chronic joint pain extends beyond the injured joint to trigger depression, anxiety, metabolic changes, and addiction risk. A knee injury that prevented him from sitting cross-legged, kneeling, or climbing stairs showed him how pain erodes identity and function across your whole life.
Joint pain to me is such a multi layered, complex personal situation. We have the pain of the joint, but then we also have the psychological impact that happens to the person who has joint pain. In my own personal journey with joint pain, I remember my last bad knee injury. I felt so limited by.
My own body, my own ability to achieve certain things.
It was frustrating, it was depressing. It made me feel like that superhero that I had been had finally met its match. Like my knee was somehow the kryptonite to the rest of me. And it was a really emotional experience. I felt like I couldn't do the things that I wanted to do. I couldn't be the man I wanted to be. I couldn't even be the doctor I wanted to be because I was suffering just like my patients were suffering. What couldn't you do like specifically? Oh, I couldn't do it. I couldn't sit cross legged, which when you think about it, is not something that really should cripple you. But being able to sit cross legged is super important. I couldn't get down on my knees, I couldn't kneel down on my left knee without excruciating pain. I couldn't step up on stairs. I had trouble climbing into my truck. These are all of the things that limit us so severely. But really, you know, but really medicine tells us, well, that's, that's an elective problem. Joint pain is not going to kill you. No, your insurance company doesn't think that's as important as, well, heart disease. And I'll grant you that if you have bad heart disease, that is a more immediate problem maybe than your knee arthritis. But I'll also tell you that the feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that happens in patients with joint pain is very real and very dangerous. There are metabolic consequences to joint pain. We know that depression and anxiety cause certain chemical changes in the body and we know that joint pain causes depression and anxiety. The joint itself affects the whole system. So that's why it's so important, so important to look at the system as a whole.
Joint pain can lead us to feel helpless, to lead us to feel like we can't even interact with the world that we know best. We can't get in our garden, we can't pick up our grandkids, we can't play soccer, we can't step up in our truck, we can't sit cross legged, we can't do yoga. There's all these can'ts that happen to people with joint pain. And I think that's an underplayed feeling, particularly in America, where we're all supposed to sweep everything under the rug, and if it's not killing us, we'll just put a band aid on it, rub some dirt on it, we'll be fine. Well, if you rub dirt on joint pain for long enough, then you're crippled. Then you end up having some kind of major surgery or having some major intervention which carries risk. So joint pain by itself, I think, is one of the more pervasive and maybe even dangerous problems that we have in modern America. In all of our first world problems, I think joint pain is really on the top five. I mean, how many decisions have you made based on how your insert painful joint here feels? There are so many different ways that joint pain affects us and changes not only the way that we interact with the world, but the chemistry in our bodies. We know that joint pain affects our psyche. We know that the longer you're in chronic pain, the more likely you are to have depression. We know that the longer you are in chronic pain, the more likely you are to have addiction. We know the longer you are in chronic pain, the more hopeless you feel. And how do I know that? Because I've been that. So.
This is where I think treating joint pain needs to be more than just a band aid. It needs to be more than just a quick fix. We need to affect the whole health span of the patient. We need to take that patient with joint pain to the peak of wellness. We need to bring them the ability.
To not just feel better in their knee or in their hip or in their shoulders, but in their existence to give them a better option for health, to give them some sort of.
Remedy to the underlying problem, which is that joint pain is affecting all of our health, all of our activities.
She Traveled from Colorado for a Different Approach to Knee Pain | Lois’ Story
