Many of the patients in pain who are referred to the chiropractic clinic at CareSTL Health are also obese, said chiropractor Ross Mattox, D.C., an assistant professor at Logan University.
Monteal Paige has been a patient at CareSTL Health several years. A few years ago, however, she started experiencing excruciating back pain and was referred to Mattox, the onsite chiropractor at the CareSTL Health location on Martin Luther King Drive.
“When she first started, she was in rough shape,” Mattox said. And she was in pain all the time. Mattox said they challenged her to do something about the stress on her back.
“We get a lot of patients that come to us with pain, and they’ve often tried medications and different stuff,” Mattox said. “Usually, it boils down: what are they going to do for themselves, not what I can do for them? For her, just like all the other patients, you’ve got to get moving and you’ve got to eat better. If you don’t change those things, then you’re looking at a pretty bleak outlook.”
In this case, Paige really listened to her doctor and turned that talk into action – and it made all the difference.
“When I first started, I had really, really bad back pain, and I was going twice a week,” Paige said. “Now I only go, like, once every two weeks.”
At first, she described her pain level as a “10-plus.” Now she rates it at “5-ish.” Even though her pain has not disappeared, the need for pain medication has. “I don’t take any pain medicine,” she said.
Mattox described the cycle of pain that people go through.
“They have pain, therefore they don’t move as much. When you don’t move as much, you start to gain weight. Now that you’re gaining weight, guess what? You’re going to have more pain, because there is more weight on their joints,” Mattox said.
“That’s the cycle: more pain, less movement, weight gain; more pain, less movement, weight gain. You’ve got to get in there and stop that somehow.”
Paige is stopping it. She has lost 70 pounds in the process of managing her pain through exercising and changing what and how she eats.
“I’m not on a diet; it was just changing my eating habits,” she said. “The only meat I eat is fish or seafood. I’ve cut out a lot of the other meat, chicken and pork and all that. And I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and drink plenty of water.”
She has resorted to no fad diets, no rippling ab routines, no insurmountable workouts.
“I do stretches at home, and they have me walking more as far as exercise,” Paige said. “It has been a great thing for me. I was weighing about 300 pounds or so, and I’m sure that had a bearing on my back. Right now I am down to 230.”
Every little bit of movement and every little dietary change helps, Mattox said. Additionally, he said his patient also took up aqua aerobics, and Paige now loves the exercise she gets in the pool three or four times a week.
“We simply get people resources that they didn’t know about,” Mattox said. “St. Louis has dozens of community centers with indoor swimming pools.” He said the pool is like a magical tool, because the buoyancy of the water takes pressure off painful joints. “Now you can move around a little more comfortably and get that exercise that you need,” he said. “But the thing is that most people don’t know that this resource exists.”
The community pool option is crucial for older patients and people who are particularly out of shape. “How many people do you know who are over 60 that go out there and do a bunch of physical exercise at the gym? Probably not that many,” Mattox said. “But if they get in the pool, it makes it a little bit easier for them.”
For Mattox, Paige presented a routine case and he offered routine advice. What was different was that she acted upon it.
“Almost every one of our patients got the talk that Monteal got – they need to move more and they need to eat better,” he said. “Monteal is a very special patient, because she really took it on and said, ‘Okay, I’ve really got to make a change.’ Her life now is dramatically different than it was a few years ago.”
