'Pain is vulnerable'

You can conquer chronic pain, Dr. James Dillard says. But you must be willing to mix alternative and conventional treatment to find what works.

By SUSAN ASCHOFF, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 18, 2003

He is not a doctor who cringes when a patient walks in waving a stack of Internet research in one hand and a bottle of ginseng in the other.

James Dillard was an acupuncturist and chiropractor before he was a physician. He melds conventional and alternative treatments for patients willing to work at finding medical answers.

The New York doctor's specialty is chronic pain, an amorphous, crippling condition that afflicts more than 50-million Americans.

"If you've got diabetes, the critical thing to do is control that sugar and that insulin. There isn't a huge amount of complementary medicine to deal with that. But if you have pain, complementary and alternative medicine has its very best application," says Dillard, who teaches at Columbia University and is an attending physician at several Manhattan hospitals.

"Because pain is vulnerable. The key is finding the therapies that work for you."

Dillard is the author of The Chronic Pain Solution: Your Personal Path to Pain Relief (with Leigh Ann Hirschman, Bantam Books, $24.95). The book is a step-by-step guide to relief by choosing from alternative and conventional medicine.

Six myths keep people in pain from healing, Dillard writes. They include a conviction that "you just have to learn to live with it" and another's assertion that "it's all in your head."

The ultimate goal is to make life significantly better and more satisfying, Dillard writes. "Maybe you'll be able to play with your grandkids again."

In a phone interview before his appearance tonight on WEDU-Ch. 3, Dillard suggested that those who suffer from chronic pain (pain that lasts more than six months) first write their "pain story." Who were you before the pain started, when did it start, when do you feel it?

Keep a pain diary, he says.

"You end up wasting so much time with the doctor because you don't know your own story," he says.

The book includes sample charts for readers to use and lists therapies from hypnosis to the Alexander Technique, which is instruction on posture and movement.

"Lots of people don't want to do the work. Fine. I'll pull out my prescription pad," Dillard says. "But then they get to deal with the risks, they've got to live with the side effects" of powerful medications.

"It's really simple. You start some basic work. I hear from people that they're better. They're really better. That's why the book is imbued with a lot of hope."

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