What the heck is going on here?
Many patients present with severe headaches to my clinic. First, my job is to make sure the cause of their pain is not severe or life-threatening. Then, ideally, I would like to decrease their pain. Unfortunately, many of the current treatments for these debilitating headaches doesn’t work too well.
One of the things that Dr. Smigel mentioned was treating these headaches with dextrose. The first time I treated someone with a severe headache, their pain decreased from a 10/10 level of pain to 1/10 within minutes! I was just as astounded as the patient when this happened. I thought to myself “What am I doing here?”. The patient gave me a hug (which had NEVER happened to me in an Urgent Care clinic) and went home with a smile on her face. I, however, was perplexed. If I can treat severe pain by injecting dextrose around someone’s nerves, what else can I use it for?
I would say that I began an intense study of this new therapy. My wife, on the other hand, would tell our friends and family that I was “obsessed”. To become proficient at this new therapy, I would need to re-learn my anatomy like I was back in medical school again.
I have attended multiple conferences to learn more about the science and clinical application of this therapy as taught by John Lyftogt, MD since then. Initially this therapy was called Neural Prolotherapy but the newer, preferred name is Lyftogt Perineural Injection Therapy (LPIT)
