Healing Joint and Back Injuries

by: Joseph Valdez, MD

Published by: Greenleaf Book Group

Reviewed by Mark Owens

Dr. Joseph Valdez’s Healing Joint and Back Injuries is a self-help book that’s both informative and reassuring. It’s informative because it covers joint and back ailments in very fine detail, including supporting hand-drawn figures and high-resolution medical pictures. It’s reassuring because it offers those with chronic ailments some measure of hope in the form of various alternatives for treatment and cure.

The paperback version of this book is just over 200 pages. The book is well organized with an introduction, ten chapters, two appendices and a reference section. The introduction gives testimonials and guides readers into the main text. Valdez does an excellent job describing what it means to be injured in layman’s prose with medical terms. He then walks through pain processes and how to start healing. The testing and healing chapters cover all the various forms of medical imaging available, and he assesses the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Valdez then discusses non-invasive treatments, and finally surgery for those where all else has failed.

The only major drawback to the book is the hard sell for prolotherapy, which is a process whereby a doctor injects a solution (e.g. sugar water) into a joint to stimulate local inflammation, which is supposed to lead to healing. There are several web entries that claim this process to be a scam, which generally means it didn’t help those folks. To be fair, there are several web testimonials claiming prolotherapy is a miracle cure. It’s hard to know whom to believe.

But the rest of the information in the book is solid, and readers looking for options for how to cure joint and back ailments would do well to read it.

Armchair Interviews says: Informative read for the millions with back problems.

Author’s Web site: http://www.ValdezMD.com