Dr. Erich G. Anderer

intervention-based medicine and how to use these other modalities that have been really in place for, you know, centuries to help kind of be adjuncts to help, you know, I'd say together formulate this kind of unified way of treating back pain and spine disease.

Yeah, no, and I think that's a good question.

And I think that, you know, truthfully, a lot of surgeons, I'd say initially, and a lot of, you know, doctors in general initially, can be a little bit apprehensive or dismissive, like I'd say, when those things kind of things come up.

But I honestly look at it as an opportunity.

Because anybody that comes in that's informed, that knows how to speak the language, knows the terms, knows a little bit about the way this disease process works, and getting this from various sources, I think, is not necessarily a bad thing.

And I think that what you can do is it kind of sets the groundwork for a conversation.

And in some ways, it means I think you're just that much farther ahead when you really have the conversation.

So I would say,

Don't necessarily look at it as an annoyance or as a hindrance to a discussion like, oh, yeah, well, that was Dr. Google.

It's not that, you know, there is information out there.

And I think what you're really looking to do is provide the context for it.

And so I usually look at it as an opportunity and say, oh, well, tell me about what you read.

Tell me about what you, you know, the different approaches that you have read about to treat your disease or your issue.

And I'm happy to kind of give you my take on it.

and why it is that I think, you know, X, Y, or Z is the way to go.

So honestly, I sort of see it as an opportunity rather than a hindrance to sort of a burgeoning doctor-patient relationship.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, for me,

Personally, I mean, again, given my background kind of working in a hospital in Brooklyn that was, you know, truthfully a safety net hospital, had been doing great work.

But, you know, I'd say under-resourced, you know, in a community that is very highly sort of Medicaid population and that really probably didn't have the access to the level of care they're getting now in their borough.