The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [124]
Insulin-like Growth Factor 1 (IGF-1)
So what happened?
The end result four months later, according to the world-class Harvard-trained spine specialist who looked at the before-and-after MRIs, was:
“I could not appreciate any before-and-after differences.”
Now, there might have been microscopic changes (cytokines, etc.), but the MRIs reflected my pain: no change.
The three sessions had cost more than $7,000, and not only was the experience expensive, it ended up being a disaster.
One of the injections in my right elbow resulted in a staph infection and emergency surgery at the University of California–San Francisco Medical Center, almost two months of limited arm use, and more than $10,000 in hospital expenses.
When I contacted the sports scientist responsible for the injections to ask for $1,500 to help defray the costs, the e-mail response was as unorthodox as the treatment:
Why would you even waste your time asking me for this when you can just go out and make far more money?
Wow.
In scientific parlance, the whole thing was a total cluster-fuck.
Not because PRP, for example, doesn’t work (I believe it will completely revolutionize regenerative medicine), but because I didn’t find the right person to administer it.
There are a lot of pitfalls when you seek out the cutting-edge: snake oil, and con artists who capitalize on the desperate, among other things. How then can you, the reader, with no desire to waste $7,000 –20,000, weed out the junk science and charlatans?
The least painful option is to let a human guinea pig test them all for you.
That’s my job.
The Reasons
First things first: why the hell would I do this to myself?
It’s quite simple. There is a price to be paid for all of the envelope- pushing I’ve done over 15+ years. Namely, more than 20 fractures and 20 dislocations, two joint surgeries (shoulder and, now, elbow), and enough tears and sprains to last a lifetime. Decades of full-contact abuse and overconfidence in all sports ending in “-boarding” has made me, as one orthopedic surgeon put it, “a 30-year-old in a 60-year-old body.”
Though it was a depressing and fatalist diagnosis, it didn’t appear uncommon. My closest male friends, also former competitive athletes, had all started creaking and groaning after age 30. The aches were turning into surgeries, small training injuries had become chronic pain, and we all recognized the pink elephant in the room: it was going to get worse. Much worse.
For me, the straw that broke the camel’s back was a series of high-dose prednisone prescriptions and epidural injections in 2009. It started with an innocuous shoulder impingement. MRIs showed no shoulder issues but uncovered cervical spine degeneration in five discs.
“This is something you’ll just need to live with” was the concluding remark, delivered with an inappropriate smile, from a spine surgeon who works with NHL and NFL teams. None of his recommended drugs or injections would fix the problem. They were nothing more than Band-Aids designed to mask symptoms, to dull the senses. I had graduated to terminal pain management.
My second day on prednisone, a strong immunosuppressant drug, I spent the entire afternoon stumbling around the Mission district in SF in a daze, looking for a car I’d parked just an hour earlier. I gave up after three hours and took a cab to a dinner meeting.
The next morning, I woke up looking like a pug and couldn’t remember who I’d had dinner with. Enough was enough. If conventional medicine couldn’t fix the problem, it was time for more drastic measures.
If I was going to fix one thing, I wanted to fix them all.
The Menu
Looking at the ultimate results (what worked and what didn’t) I could have saved myself a lot of expense by following a four-stage approach. Only when options in the first stage fail do you proceed to stage two, and so forth, up to the final stage and last resort: surgical repair.
Stage #1—Movement: Correcting posture