A Message from Dr Goodley

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Do You Need Pain Relief? Have you been unsuccessful as you search for appropriate therapy to relieve your pain? Are you among the countless people who have been needlessly suffering from pain for years despite receiving various treatments? If so, you will likely find valuable answers here, which now commences with your learning that you need to be better educated and more personally involved if you wish to live pain free. Sadly, today you cannot be a passive recipient of what is offered and reasonably expect to improve. This entire site and my book, Release From Pain, are totally dedicated to explaining why these statements are the present reality and to aid you in your search for an answer to pain.

So, you have likely already discovered that many of the traditional approaches fail to relieve pain. Perhaps they did temporarily, but when your painful problem continues to recur - and your treatments persist ritualistically because they are engrained into the system – then you need to begin to suspect that there has been a failure of basics. One prime lesson that you must learn is that therapy that is primarily technology – instruments - cannot substitute for what only hands-on understanding of injured tissues can provide – information that then is utilized to direct efficient treatment.

The types of pain describe here are predominantly those that originate in the body frame – the levers, the pulleys – the machinery of your body: pain in your joints, muscle pain, ligament pain and pain from conditions involving other supportive soft tissues.

While people naturally tend to think in terms of a body region when they think of pain, such as shoulder pain, neck pain, hip pain and back pain, your education here will help you to realize that successful pain relief often requires the approach that seeks causes from where the pain may “seep” from what seems an innocent area to be expressed in another that is truly innocent. In such cases “pain is a liar.” So, focusing exclusively on the site of a pain can well doom the therapeutic effort especially because it further encourages the rest of the habit - ritualistic treatments.  

In essence, freedom from pain may require thinking “out of the tradition-bound -box.” That may seem incongruous because these are the most common of discomforts! These are the pains that people have experienced from the beginning of humankind. These are the pains that do not destroy life but can severely impair its quality and become so intense they can totally disable – and whose cost is so enormous that it cannot even be estimated.

Since these are the pains which are the universal experience, it would seem that universal answers would have been generally known a long time ago. The fact that effective pain treatment isn’t generally available, and the story of how this tragedy happened, emphasizes your need to become informed.

On subsequent pages, I will elaborate the reasons that the search for pain relief has been frustrated and you will discover, as I reluctantly was eventually forced to, that the world is suffering from what I term a “Pain Pandemic” that has been caused and perpetuated by the medical establishment itself.

The Pain Pandemic is rampant wherever westernized medicine is dominant. It started almost 150 years ago in a time when logic and the unconditional commitment to patient welfare died- when traditional medicine repudiated essential basics. Incredibly, the approaches to promptly diagnosis and efficiently treat many of the common pains was repudiated. History will remember this time as one of the worst blunders in medical history. I created this web site to illuminate these issues and reveal those approaches that are more frequently successful.

Many painful conditions are the result of some form of “dysfunction.” A dysfunction is an abnormal structural alteration in the tissues, such as a joint misalignment that causes a disharmony of function so pain develops. Many so-called “aches and pains” fall into this category.

Pain that is caused by cancer or other serious disease is not discussed here. You will need to search elsewhere for this type of information. 

Incidentally, today, your ability to find the knowledge you need to educate yourself about your pain problem is considerably easier than previously because many online resources other than this are now available. (I will try to expand on that theme and provide you with valuable information about pain that you may not find elsewhere.)

Now, let us begin:

Pain – at least initially - has vital purpose. For most people, that purpose is to provide warning that something has gone wrong that needs to be attended. So, reasonably, you seek care. We will assume that time and proper testing demonstrates that a serious, threatening condition does not exist. But your pain persists despite treatment. And that is when you must ask yourself whether you’re receiving appropriate care.

This website is the culmination of my professional career dedicated to finding solutions for pain that has not resolved – sometimes it is called chronic pain – which merely means long lasting but is usually interpreted as a sentence of lifelong, incurable pain. So the term is easily depressing. For such good reason I extensively discuss and defuse the issues related to understanding “chronic pain.”

By studying the anatomical and neurological problems associated with many pain problems I have discovered four new diagnoses and successfully resolved them each of which were decided to be “chronic.” Most of the failures occurred in major university settings. The edifices did not succeed because traditional medical education pushed this major category of pain away from its concern. So, only for lack of understanding and applying the fundamental principles of pain diagnosis that this site is involved with, they failed. I relate this for only one purpose: to demonstrate the power of understanding basics and persisting, the same as in a hunt, following without preconception clues as they present.

“An expert is someone who uses basics better.”

And here I offer to everyone who has had to endure the penalties of misdiagnosis or incorrect treatment the opportunity to also contribute to the solution. If what I’ve just related has excited your interest, then your next step is to read Jane Presta's letters which, from a patient’s perspective, amplify these issues. She, like so many others, became frustrated with options provided her by traditional medicine to treat her pain. Her search for pain relief led her to conclude that she would have to educate herself. Jane’s letters can be found with the “Relief from Pain” documentation elsewhere on this site.

If you or someone you know is suffering from pain, it is my hope that you will find a solution somewhere within the corpus of information provided in these pages. If you are merely curious about what has gone wrong insofar as traditional medicine is concerned, then I am confident that you will nevertheless profit here, and again I hope that you will decide to become part of the solution.

 PHG