Gary Kaplan - Total Recovery: Solving the Mystery of Chronic Pain and Depression

In Total Recovery, Gary Kaplan offers a potentially game-changing insight: the neurological key to the inflammation that keeps patients in a perpetual cycle of pain and depression. If you have suffered for years without relief, this remarkable book may change your life.

ANDREW WEIL, M.D., founder and director, Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, University of Arizona, and author of True Food

With cutting-edge science and clinical expertise, Gary Kaplan has identified the source of the inflammation that keeps patients in an endless cycle of pain and depression. He offers profound insight into the way our life experiences have a cumulative effect on our health. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has suffered without relief or wants a deeper insight into how our bodies work.

MARK HYMAN, M.D., author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Blood Sugar Solution, and chairman, Institute for Functional Medicine

This fascinating book reads like a detective novel, but its not fiction. Gary Kaplan is a thoughtful integrative doctor willing to spend hourseven yearsgetting to the bottom of his patients chronic pain and illness. What he has learned could help you.

ARTHUR AGATSTON, M.D., medical director of wellness and prevention, Baptist Health South Florida, and author of The South Beach Diet

Dr. Kaplans book draws on his decades of research and clinical practice, offering us paradigmshifting insights into the causes of chronic pain. I highly recommend this book to the millions of people who live with pain and are seeking new answers.

BRIAN BERMAN, M.D., professor of family and community medicine, and director, Center for Integrative Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine

By unveiling and responding to the real culprit in chronic pain, Dr. Kaplans Total Recovery represents a radical shift in understanding illness and the path to optimal health.

TARA BRACH, Ph.D., author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge

Gary Kaplan is the Sherlock Holmes of chronic pain. Total Recovery is a must-read at every pain center, by every pain physician, and for every patient with chronic pain.

WAYNE B. JONAS, M.D., president and CEO, Samueli Institute, and former director, Office of Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health

This book is intended as a reference volume only, not as a medical manual. The information given here is designed to help you make informed decisions about your health. It is not intended as a substitute for any treatment that may have been prescribed by your doctor. If you suspect that you have a medical problem, we urge you to seek competent medical help. Mention of specific companies, organizations, or authorities in this book does not imply endorsement by the author or publisher, nor does mention of specific companies, organizations, or authorities imply that they endorse this book, its author, or the publisher.

Internet addresses and telephone numbers given in this book were accurate at the time it went to press.

Although the case studies throughout the book have been dramatized for narrative purposes, none of the medical facts have been changed. Names and identifying details have been altered to protect the anonymity of my patients. In some cases, patient composites have been used for that reason. The symptoms, treatments, and results have all been conveyed precisely as they occurred.

2014 by Gary Kaplan, DO

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

Book design by Christina Gaugler

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-62336-275-1 trade hardcover

ISBN 978-1-62336-276-8 ebook

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F OR MY PARENTS

The blessing of their love and support cannot be measured.

What Had to Happen First

What If Assaults Are Cumulative?

What If Physical Traumas Build Up?

What If Pain and Emotion Are Signs of the Same Thing?

Discovering the Single Point of Origin

How Allergies and Malnutrition Created Panic Attacks

How Food, Malaria, and a Fender Bender Led to Fibromyalgia

How Childhood Abuse and Infection Caused Chronic Pain

What You Can Do

What It All Means

WHAT HAD TO HAPPEN FIRST

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men... and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

_________

Albert Einstein

M y job is to think about zebras.

In medical school, they used to tell us, When you hear hoof-beats, think horses, not zebras. Its a version of Occams razor: The simplest answer is the best. And its good advice. Swollen lymph nodes and a high fever might be Kawasaki disease, but its far more likely to be a strep infection.

By the time I see most of my patients, the simplest answers have already been explored. Theyve already been tested by 8 to 15 specialists from Johns Hopkins, the Mayo Clinic, and other excellent medical centers. If it were a horse, they wouldve found it.

The patients I see are mysteries: a healthy, athletic 14-year-old boy who plunges into years of excruciating pain after an ACL tear and a flood in the basement; a high-powered consultant for international conglomerates who suddenly finds herself standing in a conference room with 15 executives, a migraine, and no idea how she got there.

My strategy has always been to treat the whole person, not the symptoms. But as a medical scientist, I was convinced that, when patients in chronic pain had a history of emotional, physical, and infectious assaults, all of those assaults must somehow be working together. They were all happening within the ecosystem of the body.

There had to be a single point of origin that connected them all. The question plagued me: What was the underlying mechanism?

In the end, I found it. This book tells the story of the clues that led up to that discovery, the Eureka! moment when I suddenly understood what wed been missing, and the aftermath where I confirmed, in patient after patient, that all of their apparently unrelated symptoms actually had a single neurological basis.

It all came back to Occams razor, after all.

Steve Jobs once said that people who come up with groundbreaking ideas often feel reluctant to take any credit for them. They just saw something, he said. It seemed obvious to them after a while. Their insights are based on their ability to see a connection based on the experiences theyve had. I feel exactly the same way.