When I give a presentation, my goal is to give a gift to the listeners — some new information, perspective, or insight they might not have had before. I spend time beforehand, imagining how they see the topic now, what they might be thinking, and how I should structure my talk to take them from “here” to “there.”
It’s very gratifying when they send signals that they “got it.” The funnest [sic] part about public speaking is seeing people’s eyes light up or heads nod as I speak, or having them come up all excited to talk to me afterwards, or when they send an email — or when they write about what they heard. It’s particularly graifying when the article a reporter writes matches up with what I hoped they would notice. All those things were true last week when Keith Rosenblum (a senior risk consultant from Lockton), Dr. David Ross (a neurologist and developer of the NP3 diagnostic testing method) and I gave a presentation at the SIIA (Self-Insurance Institute of America) conference last week. Our audience was a small group of professionals who work for companies (employers) that are self-insured for workers’ compensation. Our topic was “How Medical Red Herrings Drive Poor Outcomes and Big Losses— and What You Can Do to Stop Them” .
And in particular, here’s a shout-out to reporter Robert Teachout (wow, a rhyme!) for really GETTING what we were trying to get across in our session. Robert’s article appeared last Friday in HR Compliance Expert.
Dr. Ross taught the audience about the latest definition from pain experts on the essential nature of pain: it is an EXPERIENCE put together by the brain after it analyzes and interprets many things. Pain is NOT a sensation in the body. He also described why and how “objective findings” on MRI often lead doctors to over-diagnose structural spine problems and provide over-aggressive treatments — because the actual source of the pain lies in soft tissues or the brain itself.
My job in the session was to point out this obvious but often overlooked fact: doing surgery on the wrong problem is not going to make the patient’s pain and distress go away. And I introduced the audience to the idea that there are other very common causes of prolonged back pain, distress and disability (summarized as biopsychosocioeconomic (BPSE – bipsee) factors) that may mimic or worsen noxious sensations coming from the spine. Screening for and dealing with easy-to-treat BPSE factors BEFORE resorting to aggressive testing and treatment makes more sense than waiting until AFTER you’ve subjected the patient to those potentially harmful things. That’s because MRIs, opioids, injections, and surgeries increase the patient’s certainty that their problem is in their spine while at the same time failing to relieve their pain AND causing side-effects and additional problems. Keith recommended that employers / claim organizations start screening for the presence of a variety of BPSE factors — and get them addressed — BEFORE aggressive, potentially destructive and definitely expensive treatment even begins. Screening methods can include simple things like questionnaires, or fancy things like the NP3 testing methods.
In addition, even when surgery IS needed, it makes sense to screen for complicating BPSE issues and address them BEFORE surgery as well as during recuperation — because having clear indications for surgery and being a good surgical candidate doesn’t mean a person is free of the kind of BPSE issues that reduce the likelihood of a good recovery.
I sent Robert, the reporter, a compliment via email that read: “Robert, you did a remarkable job of capturing the salient facts, important implications, and key take home messages from our session.” I hope you will read his article — and that you’ll send him a note if you found it informative or helpful