i'm about to tell you a story about an injury that i had that then got worse from a medical error then got worse with the worst medical encounter i've ever heard of let alone i've had this is gonna be a dramatic story but it's gonna end with a few tidbits that you must know to prevent this from happening to you let's get started the story all starts off with me wanting to improve my wrist strength my grip strength because i wanted to have stronger risks for boxing and i said you know what let me do
dead hangs where i would hold on and work these flexors in my arm and instead what ended up happening because i went from zero to a hundred which is the worst mistake you could do with fitness and i knew that and i still did it i developed a medial epicondylitis which is known as golfer's elbow when you overuse the tendons here to flex your wrists like this it's called medial epicondylitis if you overuse the extenders like when you're playing tennis that's called lateral epicondylitis so i had the medial version of this and i was like
no big deal a little physical therapy a little icing maybe anti-inflammatories and it will go away i've treated this dozens of times even in the last few years of my practice however it became a major major problem the more that i would box especially punching the heavy bag or the speed bag i constantly noticed that the pain was increasing so while doing physical therapy while even having my match against idubbbz the pain never went away but i knew once my fight ended and i would have some time to relax that i would eventually go do
either a steroid injection or perhaps try acupuncture i'm very much evidence-based in medicine and while the evidence for acupuncture isn't great usually it's a low-risk tool that could potentially help in a lot of cases in fact i have a torn labrum that i've had ever since i was like 15 16 years old from working out improperly i had two sessions of acupuncture on that completely went away even though it bothered me for years so i've had a good experience with acupuncture find someone reputable in the city find out that they're good with sports go to
the session very professional session he explains that he's seen this a lot in fighters because we're constantly trying to keep our wrists straight like this which means that there's a lot of flexion especially when you make contact against something heavy he knew what he was talking about but was not overly confident not like oh we're definitely gonna fix this and i think that's something important to look out for when you're going for a first-time medical visit did the acupuncture treatment i was sore incredibly sore the first day because he had a unique style of using
the needles like he would twirl the needle or maybe even flicking the needle again a technique that i've never seen before after the soreness went away the next day my pain and symptoms that were there for eight months prior went down like 80 so it basically became unnoticeable unless i was doing something really strong and i was like wow this is amazing again from just one time one session doing acupuncture my pain is gone but it doesn't end there i had scheduled the second session at his recommendation when the day of that second session came
around i actually had some second thoughts it's already so much better should i even bother going again i'm getting all these needles it's limited benefit now but i'm like you know what i trust this person let me go and i went and it was a little bit more painful this time a little bit more aggressive i would say i was sore for multiple days so i like really didn't move around much after that session and then i developed the weirdest set of symptoms that i've ever had in my musculoskeletal system and it's because i developed
true nerve pain when the acupuncturist was doing the acupuncture it seems like he either hit my nerve or created some sort of scar tissue around the nerve that whenever i reached for something away from my body and there was tension placed on the skin this area of my arm lit up as if someone was holding a lighter but then when i would press on the area there would be no pain it's not like i had an injured muscle or bone or some kind of tissue here i went to hang out with one of my friends
and he like pulled me by my arm and just gently pulled my skin back i fell on the floor with the most intense pain you can imagine went back to the acupuncturist because i sent him an email and he said that he could fix it didn't fix it probably just aggravated it further to be honest i wait a week i wait two weeks not going away and i honestly i box through it it doesn't hurt normally it's only if i make like a really exaggerated movement and as i did that i noticed that the nerve
pain would get worse over time and i was really getting concerned am i doing permanent damage to this nerve so i said you know what i'm gonna find the top nerve specialist pain management specialist in new york because what my theory was if that nerve created some sort of adhesion to the skin through scar tissue maybe a hematoma like a little bleeding that happened when you put the needles in or maybe in your aroma form there's a procedure that you can do called the hydro dissection of the nerve where you actually inject near the nerve
under ultrasound guidance and put in liquid in there it doesn't even have to be super medicated liquid and it opens up the nerve and frees it up from its adhesions so i got this specialist found the best one with the most five star reviews had a legitimate website a good medical background made tv appearances that i watched a few years ago that i thought were really good so i called scheduled made the appointment cash only by the way which is a little ridiculous but i was like fine i'll pay the consultation fee very expensive it
was ridiculous it was like 600 bucks i said you know what this is really important it's my career boxing i need to figure this out when i come in the doctor does not look like his picture he looks like something happened to him with his health in his picture he looked very fit just significantly younger it looks like he's confined to his chair he has some sort of very coarse tremor where his hand is consistently moving as he's talking and at times he was even mumbling where i couldn't understand the speech that he was presenting
to me and i said okay this is no reason to jump to conclusions here maybe something happened with his health but he's still a great doctor look at these reviews let's have a conversation and find out so i sit down we start having what i thought to be a conversation and i tell him that this happened about two and a half three weeks ago and from then he just talks for like 30 40 minutes about potential treatments before examining me before asking any real questions about the the details of what happened or what symptoms i'm
experiencing and already was recommending injections of an antidepressant into my arm i know oral medications that are labeled as antidepressants can work for nerve pain but to inject them is not something that is typically done he also recommended prp as an option doesn't have great evidence for a lot of the things that we currently use it for so i asked like after 40 minutes of the of talking and very difficult to understand him what my oral treatment options were if any and he basically said that i was going to get fat if i took any
of the oral options i found that to be very aggressive and a strange comment to make because i didn't even know what oral options he was considering or what he would do so he kind of shut that down right away he said but i want to do an ultrasound i said you know i'm fine to do an ultrasound but watching him perform the ultrasound he was unsteady his tremor was preventing him from getting a clear image there was like reeds being done of the ultrasound that i understood that i thought were really highly inaccurate or
poorly explained to me as a patient and the ultrasound was done in the wrong portion of my arm he then changed the treatment plan completely he didn't really ask where my symptoms were he just started looking at my elbow another thing that stood out from the visit was he told me another patient's case said the full name of the patient said their age these are all privacy matters that should never be discussed with another patient you could say i have another patient in your age group or whatever but you can't say their full name and
at that point i was like i need to get out of here because this is this is weird this doctor didn't do a history didn't do a physical exam recommended two treatments change it to a third treatment this all for cash the doctor does not look like the picture like i didn't know what was going on and now i understand why people don't speak up in stressful situations because i genuinely didn't know what was happening i thought it was like an episode of punk that that's how bad it was it was probably my weirdest worst
patient encounter i've ever seen it was scary because i could see how if you don't have a medical understanding of what he was saying there could be some situations where you're like oh well this person's a doctor they have a license i'm gonna let them do their thing and inject whatever they say but man how scary is that he could have if i would have let him injected me with antidepressants for huge sums of money with no real explanation as to why it should work the one thing that they told me which i found ridiculous
was oh it's similar to vampire facials and i just wanted to say like my symptoms have nothing to do with vampire facials everything that could go wrong breaking down in a medical visit went wrong here and when we told him that after the visit all they said was oh do you need more information about what treatments we do we said no no what we're saying is we're worried about the well-being of your other patients as well as we think we had a horrible visit because no exam was even performed they said sorry you feel that
way here's your money back hope you heal up quickly like what upon leaving i realized i needed to reach out to some other people luckily through social media i found some great doctors who i'm thinking right here that have helped me out with my arm i ended up finding two case studies online of people who had nerve damage due to needles and they had similar symptoms to me and they did well with some oral medications including prednisone so i ended up using that for a period of a week my symptoms got a lot better they're
continuing to get better so i'm slowly recovering i'm not a hundred percent but my elbow pain went away so the acupuncture worked how how interesting is that like the acupuncture gave me this negative outcome but it solved my initial problem but all that really goes to show is a few key takeaways one is you have the right over your body to accept or deny treatment so if any doctor or medical professional is making you feel uncomfortable do not be afraid to say no and advocate for yourself you don't need to get any procedure if you
don't understand the procedure stop it don't get it done you need to adequately be able to assess risks and benefits the recommendation from your doctor for the treatment might be correct not saying they're wrong all i'm saying is if you aren't comfortable something's wrong in that situation that needs to be corrected before the procedure is done next when you're going to get some sort of alternative treatment like acupuncture no that is not a hundred percent safe you know frequently i talk about acupuncture and say you know it's safer than the surgical options so if you
could avoid surgery it's better it doesn't mean it's a hundred percent safe clearly it helped my original problem but then it created a new one that has been a real big pain i think it's like the the saying that paul often said on this channel he pointed out that anything that has evidence to work or is proven to work also has to have negative effects because if it doesn't have negative effects that means it likely doesn't do anything in the first place um as far as my arm goes hopefully you'll continue to recover and i'll
be back in the boxing ring before you know it check out all the things you should never do in the hospital click here to check that out and as always stay happy and healthy and stay alert not anxious [Music] you
