Sanjay Gupta & Eric Topol - Discuss “It Doesn’t Have to Hurt” book
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but we're going to make up for lost time with a great discussion of your new book. It doesn't have to hurt. It's about pain. And it's a topic that involves a fourth of Americans or people that have chronic pain. It's a big deal. And you've given a whole new outlook on it. And what I thought we'd start with, Sanjay, you get very personal in the book, which is really admirable. And you talk about your wife, Rebecca, who has an autoimmune disease. so bad that you had to carry her up the stairs. And can you tell us how she was able to get on top of her chronic pain problem and emerge doing really well?
Yeah, that was a tough one, Dr. Topol. And just to give you a little context, a few years before she started developing symptoms of her autoimmune disease, very active. I mean, we would do triathlons together. We would do the Malibu triathlon out in your neck of the woods.
Yeah.
And then, you know, she started to get significant symptoms. It was joint pain, sometimes rash. She carried a diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis at times. I remember talking to her once when she was in the throes of pain and I asked her to sort of point to where it hurt. And she pointed to a place on her body and said, this is the only place that doesn't hurt on my body. And so it was significant. What ended up helping her, in addition to some of the various medications that are out there, and you see ads for a lot of these medications, Humira, the TNF blockers, things like that, which are very challenging meds because there's not a specific biomarker to sort of follow. You have to just sort of see how someone's doing over weeks and months.
I think the thing that really helped her in addition to that was a very restrictive diet. It was anti-inflammatory, but even more than that, it was just a very restrictive diet. So she pared everything down to just basic white rice and baked chicken for a while and then slowly started to add things back in. And that ended up really working for her. I don't know, again, if it was TNF, tumor necrosis factor levels that went down, or if it was another inflammatory mediator. Again, we don't measure these things. But what I did know is that she felt better, she looked great, and she started to become more active again.
That's fantastic. And it emphasizes how these lifestyle factors, like an anti-inflammatory diet, and also you, of course, get into sleep, how important that is to deal with this pain. And then you have a very refreshing outlook about coping, dealing, managing pain, which, of course, most people think it's rooted at the site of injury or where the pain is felt, where obviously it's the master control center at the brain. And that gets us to, before I get into the new approaches and new approaches, everything here, which is so great about your book. One other personal story about your 82-year-old mother. Can you just give us the skinny how she emerged from having a really bad back injury?
Yeah, you know, my mom's a perfectly healthy woman, very active, and she had a pretty innocuous sort of fall, seemingly, where she sort of fell into a sitting position while rolling her suitcase one day and had pretty sudden onset back pain. She thought it would get better. It didn't. She ended up getting imaging, and it showed a It's called a compression fracture. So the vertebrae is like these blocks, one on top of the other, and one of them was sort of crushed down, so just lost a lot of height in what's called the L1, the top of the lumbar spine. And she had terrible, terrible pain. And, you know, I was already working on the book at that time. And so I was very primed to think about these things.
But I don't think even I realized how much chronic pain just hijacks your entire identity.
Yeah.
Um, that's the thing, you know, you get diabetes or cancer and these are obviously terrible diseases, but you may not know looking at someone on the street that they have that with chronic pain, it's, it's your entire life. Um, and I, I mean, I, you know, it's my mom, I obviously felt terrible for what was happening.
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