I think each of us has to be humble with what it is we think we know. We have to be sensitive to what we’ve learned in the process of taking care of others. And we always have to look outside ourselves to see if there are things that we are missing, if there are other ways to go. We have to be willing to doubt, to ask, “What am I missing here?” Is there an emotional comorbidity [other illness or symptom in the same patient] that I’ve missed? Do you have an elevated c-reactive protein and sed rate [blood tests that indicate inflammation]? Could this be a low grade rheumatologic illness? Is there a Lyme test on the chart? Is there a slow-growing hormone-elaborating tumor that may be clouding this whole picture?

It’s not that you constantly look for the million dollar workup (which is a compulsion with medical doctors), but you have to keep your mind open to other possibilities. This is why I love the fraternity of practitioners, of my other buddies. I’ve got chiropractors that I work with now that have better hands than I do and who can do certain things that some of my patients really need. Maybe it’s Nimmo [a muscular release technique] or something else that I don’t do. To serve the patient properly, I need to send him or her over to this other practitioner and let him or her take a look, to give me a new set of eyes and hands on this person. It’s a matter of staying humble and working with your colleagues, your buddies.

Regarding the importance of staying humble, the most tragic situations I’ve seen in my years in practice have been ones where an overconfident doctor was unaware of his or her own blind spots. Then every once in a while a patient arrives whose problem coincides perfectly with the doctor’s blind spot. The doctor keeps treating, thinking that he or she is addressing the source of the problem, and it turns out to be some disastrous diagnosis that they missed. This could be a medical doctor, a chiropractor, or any other kind of practitioner. It’s so important for all of us to realize that no one—whatever the letters after their names, whatever discipline they’re in—no one has all the answers. That is the essence of professional humility and it’s incredibly important.

Just getting a new set of eyes on somebody that may not be doing so well can be crucial. Obviously, depending on how complex somebody is, they may need three or four practitioners all working on them at once. They may need a psychopharmacologist, they may need a talk therapist, they may need a Reiki master. There are all sorts of different combinations. We all benefit from giving our respected colleagues a chance to do a good job as part of a team. The name of my book is The Chronic Pain Solution. The solution is finding those practitioners and those therapies that need to be on your pain team. If this one therapy or practitioner can bring down your pain 15 or 20 percent and another can bring it down another 20 percent, then when you all work together, that is that person’s pain solution. It’s not my pain solution or your pain solution, but it will be that individual’s pain solution.

It’s a willingness to appreciate the value that others bring to the care of the patient.

Absolutely. Also, Hippocrates said it’s more important to know the person that has the illness than to know what illness the person has. After I try to get to know that person, sometimes I’ll find that there’s a spiritual crisis that they’ve never dealt with. I had a patient the other day who had tremendous issues around the death of his mother. It wasn’t so much emotional; this was someone who had been a spiritual person and after his mother got sick and died, he lost his faith.