Ending Back Pain: A Book Giveaway

As a younger woman, I suffered from bouts of lower back pain. My back is better, thanks to the easy back exercises I do. For others, the solution to back pain is not so simple. 

Ending Back Pain: 5 Powerful Steps to Diagnose, Understand, and Treat Your Ailing Back (Penguin Random House) is fresh off the press. This readable and encouraging book by Dr. Jack Stern, a board-certified neurosurgeon and professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, explains most everything there is to know about back troubles and how to cure them.

Here’s what the publisher writes about Ending Back Pain:

Virtually every American will suffer from back pain at some point. Back pain is the second most common neurological ailment in the United States—only headaches are more common. And, after colds and influenza, it’s the second most common reason Americans see their doctors.

Dr. Stern brings relief to these millions of sufferers (including himself) who literally ache for help. Based on scientific data, Dr. Stern developed a five-step solution with a multidisciplinary, holistic perspective that’s been missing from conventional back pain wisdom. And it may not require surgery or another form of another invasive therapy.

In the book, he explains the six major anatomical sites that often generate pain, while also identifying other potential sources that people (and doctors) can easily overlook, such as commonly used drugs, undiagnosed illnesses or disease, and even depression.

With diagnostic self-tests, checklists to take to your next doctor’s appointment, advice on treatment options, preventative strategies and much more, Ending Back Pain will help you pinpoint the specific causes of your own back pain issues so you can get on the road to healing.

According to Dr. Stern, “Ending back pain begins with you. Diagnosing back pain is a tricky combination of art and science. Indeed, lots of high-tech tools are available to us in medicine, but that doesn’t mean that diagnosing, let alone curing, back pain is a black-and-white endeavor. Unfortunately, it’s very much to the contrary—complex, imprecise, and immensely vexing. So, the more you can contribute to the story of your back pain, the more you can shift your experience to one that’s less reliant on art and more based on science.”

Giveaway: The publisher is giving a copy of Ending Back Pain to one lucky Friend for the Ride reader. For a chance to win, please enter a comment by January 1. U.S. only. Thanks!

About the Author:  Jack Stern, M.D., Ph.D., is a board-certified neurosurgeon specializing in spinal surgery, and co-founder of Spine Options, one of America’s first facilities committed to nonsurgical care of back and neck pain. Dr. Stern is on the clinical faculty at Weill Cornell Medical College and has published numerous peer- and non peer– reviewed medical articles. He lives and practices in White Plains, New York.