A physician’s first duty is to his patients. Any compromise for personal or institutional expedience attacks the foundations of medicine. My prime purpose here is to fulfill my obligation generically by educating the countless who have been hurt because of traditionalist failure so they might more successfully navigate towards relief.
For generations, an uncountable multitude of people has unnecessarily lived in pain. I reluctantly realized over decades that there is, in fact, a Pain Pandemic. It exists and is exponentially increasing wherever Westernized medicine dominates. It is iatrogenic. It is medicine’s Fundamental Flaw.1
Among this vastness of frustration and misery are the many who were not believed because their complaints did not comply with the established gross standard for diagnosis. (While the vicissitudes of fibromyalgia-like syndromes may be here somewhere, I am not including here what is arguable.) I refer specifically to what is unequivocal, predominantly common musculoskeletal conditions in their varied manifestations whose eventual chronicity eventuated from failure to examine the affected tissues commensurate with the complaint.
These are the pains that are frequently recorded as “unsubstantiated by objective evidence.” So those unfortunates could expediently be discarded from conscious medical concern, leaving in the debris angry, defensive and depressed people whose conditions slip into chronicity at inexpressible costs to themselves in stress and its consequences, in sometimes ruinous financial loss, in damaged personal relationships, in compounding costs rippling unendingly through society…
Unseen, but ongoing nevertheless, the spillage adversely affects caring doctors caught in the quandary between rational expectations of them and their inabilities. They have been victims, as well. Medical doctors (M.D.’s, “allopaths”) who, within their own burdens of frustration, guilt, resentment, and self-defensiveness sensed that they should have been able to help had they been taught how.
I knew the pain of helplessness. I was among the therapeutically deprived in the early 1960’s, and I have spent my professional life after medical school striving to correct that horrendous omission in my training.
My Purpose
This was my license plate for 35 years.
A man glanced at it and commented, "Oh, so you're a master of pain!"
To which I responded, "No, pain is my master."
My sometimes painful odyssey is related in my eBook, Release From Pain that took me eleven to write and am now completing its re-editing with embedded demos. And in two others: Goodley Intentions and Goodley Stories that, the Almighty willing, will follow.
My purpose is to reveal the crisis in all the facets that I am aware of.
My purpose is to illustrate appropriate diagnosis and treatment through stories of patients long afflicted for whom assiduous application of fundamentals succeeded in relieving them. Their stories and the principles that directed their therapies offer guidance how the perennially frustrated may also find a path to relief.2 [LINK TO JANE PRESTA’S LETTER]
My purpose is to provide clinicians with a practical, living textbook from which they will realize essentials from which they may become far more effective in their practices, if their guiding force is to serve - and more - if they nourish a consciousness of what traditional training must begin to teach. Release From Pain has Forewords from authoritative representatives of the three major health care professions:
My purpose is to tell the unexpurgated history of Orthopaedic Medicine in North America in response to the ubiquitous question: If Orthopaedic Medicine is so uniquely essential, why isn’t it it (yet) established in traditional practice?
My purpose is to provide an archive of all the relevant documents and photographs that are available to me.
I wish you well,
Paul H. Goodley, M.D.
1 - For the strong skeptic who demands immediate proof, an authoritative justification of those statements is in the reading of the Review of my book, Release From Pain, by Richard Weiner, before his death Executive Director of the American Association of Pain Management. LINK]
2 - I must write seemingly oblivious to the overwhelmingly challenges now facing American medicine. Certainly, elsewhere, as well. Regardless of abomination, medicine always is in the one on one encounter of someone in need and the clinician they have come to for help.
“I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know; the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.”
Dr. Albert Schweitzer
But traditional training is not designed to emulate how the detective detects, how the hunter hunts - by religiously refusing preconception and rigid criteria, by approaching with quiet alertness with the senses sharp to newness, to nuance, to conjecture about what is, and not wish otherwise, to approach prepared to be taught by the affected tissues - that is where the ideal Orthopaedic Physician passes his life
List of Publications
Book Reviews
Miscellaneous
Articles of Note
Prolotherapy
What Did It?
Traction
Hip Dysfunction
Bilateral Lateral
Orthopaedic Surgery
Tendon Reflex