Chronic Pain Sufferers Find Healing In Alternative Treatments

By Kaaren Valenta

By the time most patients come to the Advanced Pain Care, PC, practice of Lawrence D. Cohen, MD, and Perry M. Perretz, DO, they are, as Dr Perretz says, literally “at the end of their line.”

“They have already seen perhaps a dozen doctors, massage therapists, chiropractors, acupuncturists,” he said. “Some even have had possibly one, two. or three surgeries.”

They are also highly committed patients –– committed to finding an answer to their pain.

‘The medical profession doesn’t understand much about pain,” Dr Perretz said. “We recognize that it exists, but we poorly understand the ways to treat it. Generally, pain is treated with medication and if that doesn’t work, try another medication. The combination of more and more powerful drugs, more and more dangerous drugs, is not the answer. Clearly something was missed along the way.”

Dr Perretz has spent more than 20 years exploring the healing potential of human touch. A licensed acupuncturist, he practiced for eight years, often working directly with neurologists and physiatrists to treat some of their most challenging cases. When he decided to enter medical school, he opted to study osteopathy, an approach to medicine that emphasizes a comprehensive knowledge of functional anatomy and utilizes manual techniques to restore optimal performance.

A skiing injury led him to discover prolotherapy, a nonsurgical treatment for ligament reconstruction and an alternative treatment for chronic pain.

“The results were fantastic,” he said. “I hadn’t been able to straighten my knee for four months, and after only one set of injections, I was moving normally again.” He decided then and there that he would incorporate prolotherapy into his practice.

After completing medical school at the University of New England, and a residency in physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Chicago, Dr Perretz sought out Dr Cohen to learn more about such alternative techniques as prolotherapy, neural therapy, and applied kinesiology.

The two physicians quickly decided that combining their training and experience would be beneficial to them and to their patients. So last year Dr Perretz joined the practice, adding his expertise in the areas of manual medicine, acupuncture, injection techniques, and cranial osteopathy.

Dr Cohen is a graduate of the Rusk Institute and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine who spent more than ten years at Danbury Hosopital serving as medical director of its Main Street Rehabilitation Center and the Worklab Human Performance Assessment Center. During this period he specialized in nonsurgical treatment of musculoskeletal pain. With an overwhelming impatience for the status quo, he investigated and trained in many alternative techniques of diagnosis and treatment. Seven years ago he became the only practitioner in the tri-state area who combines these different techniques into a multi-dimensional, holistic approach. (See Health Monitor, Summer 1998)

Chronic pain, these doctors believe, contains varying amounts of four components: structural, biochemical, electromagnetic, and psycho-emotional. All of these aspects must be considered to find the source of a patient’s pain and to eliminate it.

What Newtown resident Margaret Vernet, 56, knows is that in one treatment session, Dr Perretz eliminated the numbness and pain that she had felt on her left side for nearly ten years.

“It started when blood clots from a broken foot caused a pulmonary embolism,” she said. “My entire left side would be physically colder. I went to many doctors but no one could figure it out.”

Ms Vernet has operated her own business, Corporate Aviators, which provides corporate pilots and flight attendants in temporary and permanent assignments, from her home on The Old Road for 17 years. While working, she struggled with her medical condition, which also included plantar fascia, a very painful foot ailment caused by injury or strain to the thick fibrous band that extends from the front of the heel to the toes on the sole of the foot.

“For a long time when I’d get out of bed, I could hardly walk,” she said.

Dr Perretz used trigger-point therapy to relieve the pain from the plantar fascia and acupuncture to treat the condition on her left side.

“That same day and to this date, I’ve had no more symptoms,” Ms Vernet said. “I’m thrilled. I would recommend him and his way of treatment to anyone.”

Another Newtown resident, Tracy Tarantino, 36, saw Dr Perretz because of the excruciating pain she felt in the nerve going down her leg after a knee operation. “I had excruciating pain,” she said. “My pain was off the charts. I couldn’t walk, stand, or sit.

“I’m married with three young boys and I just couldn’t live like this. I wasn’t sleeping and had developed terrible anxiety. It was two years of bad suffering.”

Ms Tarantino said she sought out Dr Perretz at a point in her life when she “had no hope and certainly no faith, especially in doctors.”

“The last doctor I saw wanted to put a pain pump in my leg,” she said. “He told me that was my only alternative.”

Ms Tarantino admitted that she was “scared to death” but desperate for relief.

“Dr Perretz has reduced my pain by 80 percent,” she said. “He discovered that it was caused by damage to my tailbone during childbirth. Everyone else was trying to treat my leg.”

“Other doctors act like it is all in your head. Dr Perretz has given me my life back,” she said. “He is confident that I will get better.”

Dr Perretz credits Dr Janet Travell, the first woman ever to serve as White House physician, for popularizing trigger-point therapy when she used it successfully to treat President John F. Kennedy’s back.

“Her theory is that most pain is tied in some way to the muscles and can be treated by finding the trigger points in those muscles,” Dr Perretz said.

Many patients who have back problems are told that it is from bulging disks, he said. But a significantly percentage of 55 year olds will have bulging disks and no symptoms.

“Very often the pain comes from ligament strain –– a sprain. Ligaments don’t heal very well because they don’t get a good blood supply. A sprained ankle heals faster because as the patient walks on it, the blood supply increases.

“What happens in the back is that muscles are trying to do the job where the ligaments formerly did the job,” Dr Perretz said. “If a patient says that the pain is worse when I stay in one position for a long time and is better if I move around, well that usually indicated ligament weakness.”

The muscle gets no relief, goes into spasm, and develops trigger points. The referred pain from trigger points can travel a considerable distance. Trigger points in the abdomen, the pelvic area, and the legs are responsible for several common back pains.

“Trigger points are fairly well known in rehabilitation,” Dr Perretz said. “The treatment is trigger point injections and physical therapy, but the problem often comes back because the structure isn’t in place. When the treatment is done by using prolotherapy, the structure is held.”

“Prolotherapy uses reconstructive injective therapy or technique using a pro-inflamatory agent,” he said. It involves the injection of an “irritant” solution, made from an extract of either cod liver oil or dextrose, into the area where the ligaments are weak or damaged to create a localized inflammatory reaction that stimulates the body to create new tissue and heal itself.

“It supports the body’s natural functions,” Dr Perretz explained. “It encourages proper blood flow.”

It is also the treatment that persons in chronic pain seek after all the standard treatments fail.

“We don’t see the people who get better in six to 12 weeks by using the standard treatments,” Dr Perretz said. “We see people who aren’t better in 12 weeks.”

Every patient is a challenge, he said.

“One of the problems with the medical profession is that doctors are taught that what we learned in medical school is it,” he said. “But in reality there are lots of different ways to treat and we don’t know them all. I spend my life in school, learning, so that I can help those patients with chronic pain when they seek my help.”

Advanced Pain Care is at Plaza West, 100 Mill Plane Road, in Danbury. For more information about chronic pain, prolotherapy, and other alternative treatments, visit the websites www.imaginelifewithoutpain.com or www.getprolo.com and click on the names of Dr Cohen or Dr Perretz.