The Doctor Is Out

I've been dealing with a very annoying back injury for most of the summer. It doesn't feel like anything serious, just a muscle issue but the reason is is so annoying is that it seems to bounce between my upper and lower back which makes it hard to concentrate on fixing the problem area. However, even more aggravating than that is the fact the pain will slowly start to go away for a couple days only to return with a vengeance. This is always the problem with back injuries - they take forever to heal up since you can't very well avoid using your back like you could make a conscious effort to stay off a twisted ankle. Sitting the wrong way can cause back pain to flare up and just when you think you are finally in the clear with your back issue you twist a half-second too fast and searing pain shoots up your spine. After that it is not the pain which is the worst part of a back injury - it is the anticipation of pain. I'm not trying to sound tough and tell you pain doesn't hurt (it absolutely does) but when your back spasms it only hurts for that few seconds before that wave passes and then it is over. The far worse part is that now you are waiting for the next spasm and you never know when it is coming. You start moving gingerly because you are afraid of tweaking your back a second time. Of course, your back knows this and lays low just long enough for you to let your guard down, at which point it strikes again. It really is the worst muscle to pull.

About a month ago I couldn't take it anymore and went to see my doctor who prescribed me the standard cocktail of rest, lots of Advil and emailed me a series of stretches I should do each morning to try and cut down on the frequency of the spasms. Now, I've been pretty good about keeping up with the stretches (mostly) as well as taking Advil and paying attention to how I sit at my desk but there really is no way to rest back muscles. And while it gave me some peace of mind to know that my back pain wasn't the sign of something more serious, as of right now my back hasn't seen much improvement since my doctor visit. This lingering pain has really made me frustrated (not to mentioned killed my golf season), so even though I like my doctor he isn't exactly a back specialist, nor did tell me anything I hadn't already suspected on my own. That is why this afternoon I decided to embark on a quest to find a better series of stretches to see if they helped ease the tightness in my back. But before I went diving down the rabbit hole which results from a blind internet search I first wanted to find a more technical term for the muscles I have pulled, hoping that by searching for that area of my back specifically it would cut my search time down dramatically and maybe help pinpoint the problem. Not having a medical dictionary handy I went to the first name in web-based medical answers, WebMD. Big mistake.

By this point I think everyone knows that WebMD is like that hypochondriac friend we all have, only it is worse because has every disease known to humanity memorized. While your friend may be convince that your constant sneezing is the sign of a brain tumor rather than just allergies, WebMD can not only come up with the medical term for that condition it will also give you 15 other diseases that could be a sign of, all of them deadly. That is why I was not surprised when the first disease WebMD told me I had when I said my back was bothering me was kidney failure. (Never mind that the pain is located above where my kidneys are, it is in the general area and that is good enough for this program.) The next thing it suggested was blood clots. Since I clearly couldn't take it seriously anymore I began scrolling through all the suggested diseases, hoping that maybe one of the technical names would give me a better idea of what to search for in my quest for relief. That was when I noticed that every disease listed also came with a list of symptoms and what WebMD does is list every disease which is associated with the issue you came to them with, even if you don't have any of the other systems. So, even though I don't have any tingling in my leg or blood in my urine it still wanted me to know that people with kidney failure have back pain. I know that going 1 for 3 in baseball is a Hall of Fame career, but it sounds like a pretty awful success rate for a diagnostician.

Eventually I gave up and just looked for back pain relief stretches on Google, which yielded results far too close to what I'm already doing for my liking. But with that done I spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about how insane WebMD's symptom-checking formula really is. A much better system would be to let people put in multiple symptoms and slowly whittle the options down to the most likely cause before offering a guess as to what is wrong with them rather than have them enter one issue and throwing out every disease which presents with those problems, because do you have any idea how many different diseases can present in the same way? But, the larger issue is that even though we all know WebMD is going to tell everyone they're about to die regardless of what problem they enter and doctors are constantly telling people to stay off the site because their self-diagnosis are causing more problems than they are solving, we continue to go there first. I can only assume it is because the site has MD in the name, which somehow gives it credibility even though I don't see a diploma hanging anywhere on the website. Most people won't trust third-party reviews for something as simple as a television and yet we're going to take a website's word for it that we could be dying? I honestly think WebMD should have a big claimer on the site which says everything you see on the site is just a guess. I'm sure there are some out there out there who would still take the site as gospel, but those people have bigger issues to deal with than a nagging injury because as near as I can tell the D in WebMD stands for shot in the Dark.