Health Insights Today editorial board member James Dillard is an integrative pain management specialist uniquely trained as a chiropractor, acupuncturist, and medical doctor. A graduate of Cleveland Chiropractic College–Los Angeles and Rush Medical College, Dr. Dillard is the author of The Chronic Pain Solution: Your Personal Path to Pain Relief (Bantam, 2004) and was the author and moderator for the national PBS television special, Chronic Pain Relief.
He served as an Assistant Clinical Professor at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons for 12 years, and was the Medical Director of Columbia’s Rosenthal Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine during his years at the Columbia University Medical Center. He left Columbia in 2006 to go into full-time private practice in Manhattan and Stamford, Connecticut. His media appearances have included The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, and the CBS Evening News. Dr. Dillard’s website is www.drdillard.com.
In this interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood, Dr. Dillard discusses the growing collaboration among medical doctors, chiropractors and other health professionals, emphasizing the need for cooperation, coordination and making well-informed choices. He explains that while many chronic pain patients need medication in order to function, it is possible to limit the need for such medication through approaches including chiropractic, massage, yoga, meditation and a whole foods diet.
You’re the only doctor I know about who has degrees in chiropractic, acupuncture and medicine. In what order did you study these disciplines and what led you from one to the next?
There was no grand plan to do something like this. Somebody who would create a grand plan to go through all of that would probably be mentally ill. I think people evolve and their thinking evolves. Experience teaches you things if you stay awake. Experience will lead into your next challenge, your next framework. A problem that many of us have is that it’s not that hard to get stuck where you are, where you’ve been, and how you think about things.
The disciplines that originally interested me were primarily the hands-on disciplines. The first one I studied was Jin Shin Do acupressure, which involved putting my hands on people in a therapeutic way, which is certainly something that a lot of chiropractors do. Chiropractic and acupuncture training were an extension of that original interest from Jin Shin Do acupressure.
After I practiced for a couple of years, it was clear that many of my patients were taking medication and many were having surgery. I was curious about these stronger therapeutics and particularly surgery. How do you cut somebody open and sew him up without killing him? I think it’s a lifelong pattern of being curious about how these things are done. Not that it’s good or bad, important or unimportant, or superior or inferior. Just, “How does that work?”
You mentioned that the hands-on healing arts attracted you first. Do you feel that palpation has become something of a lost art in medicine?
Oh, absolutely. It’s become a lost art because medical doctors rely inordinately on fancy scans, fancy tests, a lot of lab work, and the art of physical diagnosis is not as strong as it used to be. The older MDs who trained me were phenomenal with their physical exam skills. They could find all kinds of things by listening and touching. The palpatory skills that one learns as a chiropractor, and to some extent as an acupuncturist, are definitely lost from conventional medicine.
You are a pain management specialist. To what extent are patients who come to you dependent on pain medications? And of these, how many could manage their pain with less medication, with no medication, or with different medications? |
