Half the patients in Dr. Pratibha Bansal’s office didn’t make it through their first appointment during the last years opioid prescription drugs were considered the gold standard for pain treatment.
They had to agree to a plan designed to wean them off the medications – mostly by doing stretching exercises. Many left, determined to find another doctor willing to write a prescription for pain pills, and leave it at that.
“Exercise really works,” said Bansal, who retired earlier this year. “People don’t want to believe it, but it does.”
The number of patients resistant to trying new ways to control chronic pain has thinned during the last several years, since it became more difficult to get long-term prescriptions for medications that include hydrocodone, OxyContin and fentanyl.
Patients of Bansal willing to try earlier got a leg up on remarkable results. Among them:
- A woman on workers compensation and six prescribed controlled substances after back surgery is drug-free.
- A man hit by a truck thought he would never golf again after six back and neck surgeries nearly immobilized him. He went back to work part time and hit the links again a decade later after he started seeing Bansal, who “prescribed” stretching therapy.
- A former police officer who suffered a injury on the job – and was on morphine for more than two decades – was walking in his favorite park within three days after his first visit to Bansal, and off his most dreaded prescription drug within three months.
“I’ve got a normal life again,” said the former officer, Sam Puma, of…
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