Episode 1: All Beginnings Are Difficult

In this inaugral episode, Dr. Nevo will share his vulnerable experience navigating being a chronic pain patient and physician. 

Discover the challenges that led to his transformation of practice and patient care to develop a unique "ecosystem of wellness" which aims to create a community and multidisciplinary support for those seeking holistic biopsychosocial care for chronic pain.

About Dr. Nevo
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LINKS:

• Body and Mind Pain Center
• Mind Body Rehabilitation
• Substack

Transcript

Episode 1 - All Beginnings are Difficult

Hello and welcome to Mind Your Body Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Zev Nevo. All beginnings are difficult in life. We seem to start over and over and over again. in so many ways, whether we're trying to take our life into a different direction, whether we're trying to make a change in a certain habit pursuing what we consider to be meaningful in our lives, in our relationships, in our work.

We have a lot of domains. We're complex as human beings. And in my time as a physician, I've seen and encountered a lot of people with various types of [00:02:00] pain spanning from physical to emotional pain, a lot of pain and suffering, but also a lot of resilience and. I have been blown away by the strength and the courage that I've seen from the thousands of people that I've been fortunate enough to encounter and help facilitate healing in one way or another.

Over the years, I wanted to use this platform as a way of honestly being vulnerable and sharing a bit about my personal story and how my life has been transformed over the years, specifically over the past five years. 

This is my way of paying forward the lessons and tools that I've [00:03:00] learned being a patient in chronic pain at the same time that I am a physician treating people in pain and how that's transformed my approach to patient care. It's helped me on this journey to self-actualize and find indefatiguable drive and passion.

And I'd love to share this vision with you. Allow me to start off by reading a blog article posted on our online communityMy story is called From Pain to Purpose This wasn't easy to write. In fact, this will be one of the most challenging endeavors of my life. Being this vulnerable and exposed is not a place of comfort for an introvert like myself. Most people who knew [00:04:00] me growing up would probably describe me as someone who flies under the radar friendly.

Jovial, full of self-deprecating humor, and hardworking. Here's a little bit about me and how my life got flipped upside down. After completing a 14 year track, including undergraduate , medical school, residency, I moved to California to complete a fellowship in interventional sports spine and regenerative medicine in beautiful Napa, California.

My wife and kids remained a plane flight away in Southern California and I spent every weekend traveling to visit them. Following this exhausting year, I decided to open up a private practice, and then hit. My other job seeing pain management consults in nursing homes was also a no-go as they stopped admitting patients for months due to [00:05:00] rampant morbidity and mortality from the COVID-19 virus .

I was left with doing remote consulting for a disability company where I would sit at the computer for hours and hours trying to keep my new practice afloat and put food on the table. Years prior, I was in a car accident and experienced a pretty nasty whiplash injury, aside from some periodic flares of neck pain, poor posture, and some disc bulges that never quite resolved.

I was mostly deemed stable this many years later, but I remember it vividly December, 2020. I had just completed a hundred plus hour month on the computer. I stood up and sneezed, and the rest is history. At first, the pain was like a cape of fire down both my arms. I realized I must have herniated a disc in my neck and practiced what I preach.

After modifying my activity and body positioning, the pain on my left side slowly dissipated, [00:06:00] but the right side was getting worse each day an MRI of my cervical spine confirmed my worst fears. I had extruded a disc deep into my spinal canal and right side where the sixth cervical nerve travels out to supply sensation to part of my right arm as well as many of my forearm muscles.

As the days turned into weeks, I ferociously attempted everything I knew to treat my symptoms, medications, physical therapy, injections, heat and ice, you name it. So ultimately just accepting the pain as something I would just have to live with, cope with, manage the constant nature of searing pain into my right arm, which was easily a 12 out of 10.

Intensity at rest was amplified nearly tenfold with any neck movement whatsoever. I required my neck squeezed tightly, basically choked to even transition to and from a lying position I was averaging [00:07:00] less than an hour of sleep per night for at least four months. I was heavily medicated and continued to work and tried to live a functional life throughout this time, as I started to lose more and more strength in my right arm, the longevity of my new career came into question.

You see, for me to perform injections, I require my left hand to hold the needle. Yes, I'm a lefty and my right to carefully hold an ultrasound transducer It was becoming impossible to even perform my basic activities of daily life, like grooming or putting on a shirt. I had to give up strength training and pretty much all exercise my sheer exhaustion and grogginess from all the medications.

Coupled with extreme financial stress pushed me to ultimately pursue surgery as the last resort. After meeting with a couple of surgeons, I found an esteemed and confident, spine surgeon who scheduled me for an artificial disc replacement with removal [00:08:00] of the disc material that was pressing on my nerve and spinal cord.

Gosh, I was so hopeful that life would, you know, get back to normal after the surgery. Fixed my problem a little. Did I realize how our brains get sensitized from the trauma of going through an experience like this? 

I should have been fixed at this point, right? Wrong. The next few months, I learned the hard way about all the baggage that remains when experiencing chronic pain. These include things like fear of movement, fear of pain itself, severe anxiety, ongoing insomnia, extreme fatigue and deconditioning weight gain from sedentary behavior, and turning to food for comfort.

Other goodies included depression, burnout, panic attacks, loneliness, isolation, shame, ultimately leading to [00:09:00] an identity crisis. I believe they call this rock bottom. Luckily the story doesn't end there. It took 13 months of therapy, reading dozens of books, listening and learning from as many experts as possible.

I filled journals worth of notes, quotes, letters to myself, endless, to-do lists and work worksheets. I absorbed the lessons from Dr. Gabor Mate, Dr. Lissa Rankin, Dr. John Sarno. Brene Brown, Tara Brach, and more. I learned so many important lessons that helped arm me with the tools needed to experience purpose and self-identity.

The strategies I've learned continue to help me work through difficult situations and approach life through a lens of hope, optimism, and positivity. I finally returned to work with a fire under my skin and a passion to pay forward what I've learned to my beloved [00:10:00] patients. I also recognize that more needs to be done.

The current healthcare system seems to foster a divide between camps focused on strictly following checklists and narrow protocols for treating pain conditions, specifically focusing on the biological model of pain generation. Yet in many cases, completely neglecting the mind body connection behind what drives pain, to perpetuate and amplify beyond the period when structural injuries should have improved.

The whole field of pain management or psychological strategies to help patients better cope with their pain is faulty at best. It fosters an identity of being a chronic pain patient. And removes hope or optimism for a life without pain. It creates learned helplessness. It promotes a sense of fatalism and actually strengthens the very neural pathways that [00:11:00] amplify pain through a process called predictive processing.

Furthermore, it's undeniable that different people heal in different ways. My patients who received complimentary and alternative medicine treatments, Such as chiropractic or acupuncture or energy healing, often had to attend these surreptitiously. After my experience, I truly understood how stress, trauma, and the imprints of chronic pain can wreak havoc on our lives, affecting our mood, emotions, thoughts, personality, traits beyond the symptoms of pain itself. My solution was to create an ecosystem of healing , comprised of three parts. Number one, an interdisciplinary clinic where the psychosocial modalities of healing and care can be provided under one roof and virtually by a team of empathetic, kind, and nurturing skilled [00:12:00] practitioners

 An expansive list of mental health, lifestyle, aesthetic, mindful health and wellness services are available at your fingertips. Number two. A vibrant, one of a kind online community called Mind Body Rehabilitation to help people connect, find support and resources, share struggles and wins, and learn in an intimate environment with leading experts.

The community is a safe space and place to engage and learn with a variety of content, resources, and both virtual and local events planned in the near future. Number three, this podcast. An authentic podcast called Mind Your Body, where I will be sharing the lessons I've learned discussing various medical topics related to sports medicine, spine conditions, regenerative medicine, and exciting treatments, as well as educating on the lessons I've learned on mind Body psychoeducation.[00:13:00] 

I'm so grateful to be dedicating the rest of my life to this endeavor. I want to thank you for listening to my story, and I look forward to meeting each and every one of you. I hope you find our contribution of value to your life and may you find and experience relief, peace and contentment in life . In future episodes.

I look forward to diving into the details and sharing these insights. Please join me for the ride.