I played golf with sharp and disabling lower back pain for twenty-five years before I learned how to make it go away. Trigger point injections and myofascial work always helped; but when I learned about inflammatory food, there came my first almost pain-free nine holes. Then with platelet-rich plasma, prolotherapy, and repairing tendon injuries, I can hit golf balls as hard as I want with no pain on any swing…unless my food is contaminated with gluten… and then I am in pain for three weeks.

Twenty years ago, I walked off the tennis court with pain in my knees that was bad enough to prevent running and reaching to hit a ball. With what I researched and learned, my bow-legged knees were pain free in six months and without surgery can still ski black diamond mogul slopes and bend to play tennis.

Do you know someone, have a patient, or do you yourself suffer with chronic pain? How many practitioners have been seen, and how many therapies have been tried? Perhaps surgery has been suggested and even already performed.

What do you do if there is a paper cut on your finger and it is bleeding? Options include emergency room for the severity of bleeding, take some ibuprofen and wait until morning, or apply pressure to stop the bleeding. This answer is pretty simple. So what if your back or knee hurt after a game of tennis? Options again include emergency room, taking ibuprofen and waiting until morning, and what if you could apply pressure somewhere and make the pain go away? In actuality, this is more than possible and thoroughly changes how I think about pain and its treatment.

One of the unfortunate phenomena in medicine is that the doctor recommending your treatment, and perhaps even surgery, has likely never really touched you. A pain patient’s examination and recommendations are typically based on X-ray, CT scan, MRI scan, and perhaps other diagnostic studies.

Indeed, finding these clues of what causes pain requires a different kind of physical examination than what doctors and health care providers are usually taught. It’s not the stethoscope, x-ray, MRI, or pin prick test, but rather a gentle and specific touch that provides many of the necessary clues.

How can we discover the location of these important clues to a lifetime of pain-causing injuries?

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When a patient presents asking for evaluation of pain, the practitioner is being asked to play CSI for pain. A diagnostic medical “who done it.” In diagnosing and treating chronic pain, our research has led to conclusions that form the basis of the Blatman Method – Five Rules of Pain CSI^®.

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