Anyone who has endured back pain knows it is an erratic dictator. It takes hold of your psyche, demanding your attention and devotion before all else – before you can plan a hike, return to a work routine, or pick up your child for a hug. So when someone offers to make that dictator disappear, it’s hard to resist, no matter what the price.
“People in pain are poor decision-makers,” says the investigative journalist Cathryn J. Ramin, author of Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery. Such bad decisions made in pain, she argues, have fueled a $100-billion-per-year back pain industry in the US; one that’s largely selling Americans wrong – and even dangerous – treatments and responses to back discomfort.
Back injuries are the #1 money maker for many work comp clinics…dishing out standardized programs and false hope. Just like Ramin’s, who experienced a panoply of expensive and ineffective treatments, your injured worker may be getting crooked. And through this process discomfort only intensified, leaving them frustrated and perplexed. Case management can be the eyes and support to help search for better solutions, to expose a much bigger problem and help bring resolution to work injury claims.
Reference: Cathryn J. Ramin: Crooked