The Berman Method
The Berman Method
Episode #192: Your Body's Ability to Heal It's Self
America stands alone in its approach to healthcare, and not in a good way. Pharmaceuticals and food ingredients that are banned in Europe and Canada fill our medicine cabinets and grocery shelves. Meanwhile, patients are routinely told they need joint replacements when their bodies have the capacity to heal without surgery.
The Bermans tackle this David vs. Goliath scenario head-on, exposing how corporate medicine, big pharma, and health insurance companies consistently prioritize profits over patient outcomes. "A patient cured is a customer lost" isn't just a catchy phrase—it's the unfortunate reality driving American healthcare decisions.
Through compelling case studies, including Dr. Berman's own stepfather's knee replacement journey, we uncover a startling truth: pain often doesn't correlate with what appears on imaging. Patients with "perfect" X-rays can experience debilitating pain, while others with "horrendous" X-rays may function relatively well. Even more telling, many patients continue experiencing pain after joint replacement surgery—clear evidence that the joint itself wasn't the primary pain generator.
What's actually happening in most cases is that the surrounding tissues—muscles, tendons, and ligaments—are responsible for the pain. By strengthening these supportive structures, many patients achieve significant pain relief without surgical intervention. This principle applies universally, from major joints like knees and hips to smaller joints like knuckles and toes.
The Bermans also introduce breakthrough technologies like StemPod and shockwave therapy that are helping patients heal faster by addressing both neurological and structural components of joint pain. These cutting-edge treatments, combined with proper strengthening, offer hope for those who've been told surgery is their only option.
Ready to question conventional wisdom and explore your body's natural healing capabilities? Subscribe to the Berman Method podcast and visit bermanpt.com to learn more about how you can take control of your health journey. Your body has remarkable healing potential—we'll show you how to unlock it.
This is the Berman Method podcast, featuring Dr Jake Berman and physician assistant Jenny Berman. We are here to treat problems and not symptoms. Disclaimer this podcast is for entertainment purposes only and not to treat anyone or to give medical advice. If you are interested in any information that we are giving and would like to use this for yourself, we recommend that you contact your primary care physician or reach out to us and ask us questions about yourself specifically. Enjoy.
Speaker 2:And we're rolling baby with the Berman Method podcast. Dr Jake Berman here with my beautiful co-host. Jenny Berman, physician assistant and we got walker ryan army crawling on the ground making moves. We're making moves, babe. Look at you, looking at me, looking at you. What's happening, man?
Speaker 1:he is army crawling all around, getting up on his knees a little bit yeah way earlier than the girls ever did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is fun. It's interesting how different all three kids are. It's true, like very different.
Speaker 1:It's true, personality wise also.
Speaker 2:Yeah, six months old definitely different personality, Like night and day.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm. So here we are, here we are, we're back. Happy Monday morning, yeah, so here we are. Here we are Happy Monday morning, yeah it feels like it's been a while. It has been a couple weeks. We took our trip to Jamaica. We completed the MRF. We talked about that live last time.
Speaker 2:It took me a week to recover from that.
Speaker 1:OMG, but it uncovered some difficulties for you.
Speaker 2:Did it uncover some difficulties for you? Did it uncover some difficulties, or did it just?
Speaker 1:reemphasize the difficulties that I already knew I had. True, do you think you'll do anything different about these difficulties this time?
Speaker 2:Probably not.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to talk Jake into coming to burn boot camp on cardio days, not in Naples because Naples is a women's only gym, but when we're out and about trying out the burn boot camp cardio days.
Speaker 2:I'm just concerned that if I spend too much time on cardio, what's going to happen to the guns?
Speaker 1:It's not if you're doing strength and cardio together. So HIIT style training with strength and cardio, it's not like it's sustained running a half marathon where your cortisol level is chronically high and you're burning through your muscle mass. Strength is extremely important for the metabolism. Muscle mass is extremely important for the metabolism. Muscle mass is extremely important for the metabolism and there's no doubt that we should be doing strength four and five times a week. However, your body still needs cardiovascular exercise to support heart health and to get oxygen to the cell so we can actually utilize some of our glucose as well. So it's really important to do a balance of cardio and strength.
Speaker 2:Okay, anyways, in other news, In other news.
Speaker 2:Here we are, David, against Goliath, Goliath being the corporate medical system, big pharma, the health insurance companies. They do not have your best interests in mind. They will choose profits over patient outcomes every single time, Because think about it a patient cured is a customer loss. Jenny and I both had to laugh yesterday evening. We're watching TV and back-to-back commercials on moderate to severe, back-to-back commercials on moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, followed by Crohn's, and one of our friends sent Jenny this meme I think it was a week ago or so and said man, I just I'm really really hoping that one day that I'll just be half as happy as somebody in a commercial with moderate to severe plexor, because it's true, they're always so happy on the commercials and they're like really suffering from this autoimmune issue, but the medication just makes it all better in 12 to 18 months.
Speaker 1:12 to 18 months.
Speaker 2:Yes, don't forget, you've got to use it for 12 to 18 months. So that's what we're dealing with, and people are getting smarter. They're getting smarter every single day, every single week. People are starting to do their own research. People are realizing that America is literally the only country in the entire world that does health care the way that we do it. I mean the amount of pharmaceuticals that are FDA approved in America that are banned everywhere else in the country, including Europe and Canada. I mean we're not talking about third world countries, we're talking about Europe. They're literally banned.
Speaker 1:Not just pharmaceuticals, food products. There's so many food products here that are banned in the UK.
Speaker 2:There's two different versions of Froot Loops. There's an American version of Froot Loops and then there's a Froot Loops that the rest of the world can eat.
Speaker 1:There's two different versions of ketchup, two different versions. Something that should just be tomatoes and water and maybe a little salt, but in America it has 16 ingredients in it. It's nuts.
Speaker 2:It's absolutely nuts. It's ludicrous. And people are getting smarter. We're starting to figure out that you don't have to just listen to what your doctor is telling you. You need to question it. And again, this has nothing to do with doctors being bad. They're not being maleficent. They're not intentionally being bad. This is just the system that they grew up in. The system that they were educated in is when you're strangle-held by insurance companies, you don't have time to treat the patient.
Speaker 1:I said that, saying last week that one of my buddies sent me where doctors prescribe a medication that they know nothing about or know very little about about a disease that they know even littler about to a patient that they know nothing about, and you should definitely go listen to the Memorial Day episode, where we did talk about myself going through a very similar regimen of that I don't even know what to call it, but a similar story of a doctor prescribing me medicine they knew nothing about, and so go back and listen to that episode most definitely. But here we are. What are we?
Speaker 2:Here we are Today. I want to talk a little bit more about this idea of the body's ability to heal itself, specifically when it comes to pain, because, again, I'm hearing more and more stories of people who did not accept the answer that they were given from their orthopedic surgeon, which was you need to have a knee replacement, you need to have a hip replacement, you need to have a shoulder replacement. I'm hearing more and more stories about these people that did not listen to this advice from their specialist orthopedic surgeon specialist and said screw it, I'm going to do something else. And the fifth, most fifth grade reading level way I can say it is this last one that I heard just last week. It was a knee issue and he was told he had to have a knee replacement. I didn't know this guy. I didn't know him before he had the knee pain or after the or. I just met him briefly after he went through this experience. But he was told five years ago that he had to have a knee replacement and he said, said no. And he found some guy on YouTube saying here's how you avoid a knee replacement and just start going through these movements. And this guy was telling me that he did them religiously, every single day. And here we are five years later, he has zero knee pain.
Speaker 2:Now, granted, this is not everybody, right this? Everybody is unique. Everybody has their own stories, my stepdad stepdad being one of them. He did everything he could for 10 years to avoid a knee replacement and ultimately had to have one. So it's not everybody, but it is a lot of people.
Speaker 2:There is a lot of people that are told that they have to have an orthopedic surgery because of the pain that they're experiencing, and it's just not true. It's not true. If you give your body the chance to heal itself, most of the time it will. Now let me explain what I mean by heal itself, because the first thing that I get is pushback on. Well, you can't regrow cartilage. Okay, that's true, that is true. I don't know how long it's going to be true. With the advancements in stem cells that we're seeing, I got an accelerated pace. But right now, it is true, you cannot regrow cartilage in a hip or a knee joint, but what you can do is you can heal everything around it. And let's just use my stepdad for an example.
Speaker 2:Again, my stepdad had knee pain for over 10 years. He didn't believe it was 10 years, but since the day that I opened, he was coming in and trying to avoid knee surgery ultimately, and I opened in 2015. So we're in 10 years now. We're coming on 10 years and ultimately, the reason why he had to have a knee replacement was because on x-ray there was no cartilage left. It is bone on bone. There's nothing that could be done about it and he was in excruciating pain. The two months leading up to the knee replacement he couldn't even walk. He wasn't walking, he couldn't even walk. Now here's a little fun fact for all of you cortisone injection seekers out there, all of you cortisone injection seekers out there If you're planning on getting a joint replacement, it has to be 90 days after your last cortisone injection. Any steroid, yeah. Any steroid, yeah. So again, my stepdad, doing everything he possibly could to avoid a knee replacement, got a cortisone injection to try to dull the pain. It didn't work. Right, a cortisone injection to try to dull the pain. It didn't work.
Speaker 1:So a month later he's in excruciating pain and he literally can't walk anymore. On crutches, on a walker. Yeah, 67-year-old man, otherwise pretty healthy, on crutches or on a walker, which was just tough.
Speaker 2:And he's just waiting waiting 90 days for the cortisone to be out of his system so they could chop the knee off, put a new one in there Right Now. Here's the important part. He had the knee replacement because he was in excruciating pain. After the knee replacement he's still in excruciating pain, Right right.
Speaker 1:So is it actually the joint causing the pain?
Speaker 2:It can be.
Speaker 1:No, because now he has a new joint and it's still very painful.
Speaker 2:It's plastic and metal, and plastic and metal don't have pain receptors Right, and he's still in excruciating pain. So the point of this is that most of the time the pain is not coming from what you see on an x-ray.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:It can correlate with what you're seeing on an x-ray.
Speaker 1:Right, and I'm seeing that right now One of my young lady pickleball players she's in her 50s, loves playing pickleball and is having a lot of hip and knee pain and went to the orthopedic, had MRIs done of both and they're telling her you have a labral tear in the hip, you have several tears of the meniscus in your knee, but not bad enough that we need to be doing hip or knee replacements yet. You do have arthritis, but we're not looking to replace them yet. And she hears this word yet and she's like what does that mean? And I say well, obviously your pain's not coming from the issues they're seeing on the MRI, your pain's coming from something else.
Speaker 2:You're hitting the nail on the head right there. So 10 years of doing this in my own practice, and I've seen such a similar story from complete opposite ends of the spectrum of x-rays, where I'll have somebody come into the office with an x-ray of a hip or a knee in excruciating pain and their x-ray says their hip or knee is perfect. And then I'll have somebody, like my stepdad, come into the office with knee pain or hip pain and excruciating pain and their x-ray says it's horrendous. What we have to understand is that the pain cannot be coming from the x-ray. It can't be Right, because if it were, after my stepdad was out of surgery, he wouldn't be in pain anymore.
Speaker 1:Right, right and similar to this patient with the labral tears and the meniscus tears. As I said to her, how many 55-year-old pickleball players have the same exact MRIs and don't have pain? So many of them? I mean, how many 55-year-old women, active women, who've been in sports their whole life, have tears of their meniscus? 80 plus percent?
Speaker 2:you think At least 60 percent, because they've done studies on this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and don't have pain.
Speaker 2:Exactly so yes. So the point of this is that the body has an amazing ability to heal itself, and when I say heal itself, my definition of healing is to become more functional. Ideally that means less pain or no pain. It doesn't mean that heal itself, you regrew cartilage.
Speaker 1:Right, right, but you're strengthening the areas around, you're becoming more functional with the areas around the joints, so the glute muscles, the core muscles, the quad muscles, becoming more functional and activating appropriately to take stress out of the joint, which allows the joint to recover and rest.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and we're using the knee and the hip in this particular episode, but it's every single joint in the whole entire body. I cannot tell you how many women mostly some males, but mostly women come and say look at my hands, they're arthritic, there's nothing I can do about it. I've got rheumatoid arthritis or I've got some type of arthritis in my fingers. Look at my knuckles they're getting bigger. It's just something I'm going to have to live with and I'm going. Just because it's your finger doesn't mean it's different. You have some Walker's frustrated. Now he's agreeing with this statement. That was a lot of work, wasn't it? He's been crawling around since we started this, so 15 minutes he's been army crawling around.
Speaker 1:Working.
Speaker 2:Good job, Walker. But just because it's your knuckle doesn't mean it's different from your knee or your hip or your shoulder. You still got to strengthen the muscles around your knuckle and if you don't strengthen the muscles around your knuckles, they're going to keep getting worse and worse and worse.
Speaker 1:Most definitely to where, then, they're going to tell you need a joint replacement of your knuckles? They're going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. Most definitely, to where, then, they're going to tell you need a joint replacement of your knuckles?
Speaker 2:Exactly Now. You need a thumb replacement. Thumb joint replacement.
Speaker 1:Right, and speaking of that while we're talking on this topic, have you seen an improvement of the arthritic pain with using your St pod and shockwave?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's been a game changer, absolute game changer, in decreasing the pain response so that we can actually get the muscles around it to wake up and do their job. So we haven't talked a whole lot about it, but we've got this fancy new technology that's cutting edge. We're the only place in Southwest Florida that has it at the moment, called StemPod, and it essentially reboots your nerves so that they can fire the way that they should, and then shockwave heals, accelerates the healing process of the soft tissues, the muscles, tendons and ligaments. So this has been a one-two punch with our arthritic joint pain and my clients are absolutely loving it these past couple of months.
Speaker 1:I'm going to try a StemPod out today for the first time on a very chronic five-year hamstring strain that I've had, where we've really tried a lot to improve my hamstring pain we have I have oh. You've worked on my hamstring for many years. Several of your therapists have worked on my hamstring, maybe not consistently enough yeah. But they have, so we're going to try out the StemPod.
Speaker 2:We've never done a full plan of care.
Speaker 1:That's not true. Last summer I came three days a week.
Speaker 2:For how many weeks?
Speaker 1:Six.
Speaker 2:Really. Yeah, I'm going to go back on the schedule and look.
Speaker 1:Seriously, I did three days a week for six weeks and it did get better. And then it's when I start running more. I start running more and we know we have a weak glute. And then I had another baby and a weak glute.
Speaker 2:Wait a minute. You're saying it gets worse with running weak glute.
Speaker 1:Wait a minute. You're saying it gets worse with running. What After a baby? So anyway, we're going to go back to re-strengthening my glutes and we're going to try StemPod and Shockwave and I'm going to report back.
Speaker 2:Yes, this is going to be fun. I'm really looking forward to this.
Speaker 1:Case study.
Speaker 2:Yeah, case study, and I'm really looking forward to the consistency of a plan of care with you.
Speaker 1:Now the whole world knows, so I'll have to be accountable to it. I work well with accountability.
Speaker 2:You do, you work very well with accountability.
Speaker 1:But I have to be accountable to someone else, not just myself. So there you go, find a coach.
Speaker 2:Yep, and it's not me. You can't be accountable to a family member. It does not work. Nope, nope, she's looking at me as I had two cupcakes last night.
Speaker 1:One was healthy. I made it. I made a healthy cupcake. Stella told me she wanted to be on the podcast this morning so she could talk about being healthy, because being healthy means that you can have healthy treats. Sometimes is what she told me. She goes because mom makes healthy treats and so I can have a healthy treat after dinner if I eat all my dinner and that's still healthy, it's true, you can make healthy treats and not feel deprived.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those cupcakes you made were very, very healthy and very, very delicious.
Speaker 1:That's right. Yeah, all right Cool.
Speaker 2:Good. So that's what I'm going to leave you with. Your body has the ability, as an amazing ability, to heal itself If you give it the opportunity to do so. It doesn't mean it's going to regrow cartilage, but what it does mean is that you can get more functional, and it doesn't just have to be a knee or hip. It can be your knuckle, it can be your elbow, your shoulder, your big toe joint. Oh my gosh, don't even get me started on the feet.
Speaker 1:Your bread and butter, the feet. We just met someone this past weekend that was like it's my feet. I've tried all these shoes and these inserts and they make it worse and you're like I love feet. Come and see me, you don't need the inserts.
Speaker 2:I don't love feet, I just specialize in feet.
Speaker 1:You're great at feet. Yeah, I don't have a foot fetish.
Speaker 2:I'm just really good at figuring out what's going on with the foot.
Speaker 1:So you don't need to spend all this money on insoles and podiatry surgeries. You just need to figure out where the problem is, and it's probably coming from higher up, not just the foot itself. So come figure it out.
Speaker 2:Maybe Stay in your lane. Heal the foot. Yeah, stay in your lane again, maybe not from higher up.
Speaker 1:I said maybe, maybe, so maybe maybe not. I didn't say it's definitely coming from higher up.
Speaker 2:Touche Fair enough.
Speaker 1:You stay in your lane. I'm trying Good, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:So check out StemPod. Give me a text, call email, let me know if you want to check it out. This thing is insane, so don't miss out on this.
Speaker 1:And stay accountable to someone else. To help you heal I love it.
Speaker 1:Ciao for now. Thank you for subscribing on your social media and podcast platforms to the Berman Method Dr Jake Berman with Berman Physical Therapy and Jenny Berman, physician Assistant, with Berman Health and Wellness. You can find more information on our website wwwbermanptcom for physical therapy, wwwbermanptcom forward slash wellness for the health and wellness. You can also find us on social media, facebook, instagram and on your podcast platform, so be sure to follow us, like us, subscribe to us and, if you would like any further information, definitely visit our website and reach out to us. You may also find our free reports on the websites as well, where you can download this free information for yourself. Have a great day.