A lesson on how to find the simple origin of lower back pain.
My patient Andrew (not his real name) had chronic lower back pain on his right side for 30 years, but in the last 18 months, his lower back pain became more pronounced, to the point of not being able to sit down anymore on any chair because the pain was too intense. Anti-inflammatories worked for a while then stopped working.
Andrew never had his back X-Rayed, nor did he have any MRI of his lower spine despite his doctors recommending those.
Was there a simple, easy-to-fix cause of the pain, or was it a complex difficult-to-solve problem? Could Andrew even have bone cancer?
I thought that if Andrew had bone cancer, the pain would have gotten worse in the last 18 months, but since Andrew’s pain was about the same as 18 months prior, I decided not to insist on pushing him to get his back X-Rayed.
