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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – Over 77 million people in the United States experience back pain each year. For some, the pain is present day and night, but for others, it shows up the moment a suitcase comes out of the closet, or whenever the relatives come to stay. All in, back trouble costs the United States about one hundred billion dollars a year, more than the cost of treating cancer, coronary artery disease, and AIDS combined. This prevalent woe exists in a political, psychological, social and economic context that greatly influences how patients will be treated—and if they’ll recover.
Journalist and author Cathryn Jakobson Ramin, whose New York Times bestseller Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife was published in 2007, spent years and a small fortune in her effort to resolve her own low back pain. When nothing worked, she decided to take an investigative look at the reality of spine medicine. Expensive, ineffective, sometimes illegal and often harmful, she found that the back pain industry exemplified the worst aspects of the U.S. health care system. The result is Ramin’s ground-breaking new book, CROOKED: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recover y (Harper, $27.99/$34.99 Can., Hardcover; ISBN
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