A new book by Professor/Dr. Rothbart says that a recently discovered foot structure which can be effectively treated without drugs or surgery has been proven to be the source of a great deal of chronic muscle and joint pain.

On first reading the book, “Forever Free From Chronic Pain: the pain sufferers guide to getting your life back,” I felt this explanation was fantastical, almost unbelievable. Could a slightly twisted foot really be the reason so many millions of people live in unrelenting pain?

But on a second reading, I began to develop a better understanding of the source of much muscle and joint pain as well as the way to resolve it.

Professor/Dr. Rothbart is a podiatrist and surgeon who spent the better part of his career in clinical practice and research. But in 1991, an auto accident left him with neck and shoulder pain that did not respond to traditional medical therapy.

He sought out alternative therapies and tried countless practitioners, but when continuing pain threatened his career, Professor/Dr. Rothbart finally decided he would have to help himself.

That’s when Rothbart began his research into chronic musculoskeletal pain, or pain of the muscles and joints. His work lead him to the discovery of a very common source of musculoskeletal pain that begins in the foot, but is frequently the source of pain in the knees, hips, back and all the way up to the jaw.

What Prof/Dr Rothbart discovered was an embryological foot structure that forms in about the seventh week of development. That is to say, the foot of the growing fetus does not develop normally.  This embryological foot structure results in lifelong poor posture and that forced poor posture, the doctor’s research proved, is frequently the source of chronic musculoskeletal pain.

Furthermore, the doctor discovered the condition is inherited. Typically, if you have chronic pain and this foot structure is the source, it’s likely one of your parents will have a history of chronic pain. You may also pass it on to your children.

The embryological foot structure he discovered now bears the doctor’s name: Rothbarts Foot.

The therapy Professor/Dr. Rothbart developed involves neither drugs nor surgery. It is, he says, geared toward normalizing the foot, which then automates the correction of poor posture and allows the body to heal without drugs or surgery.

The therapy is done in a unique way. It begins with specialized shoe inserts. As the foot structure is corrected, the foot sends new signals to the brain, literally reprogramming the central nervous system to correct the posture. As the posture automatically corrects, pain ceases. “This is not about managing pain,” says Professor/Dr. Rothbart. “It's about eliminating chronic muscle and joint paint. My therapy reprograms the brain to adopt perfect posture, thus removing the source of pain.”

If, after the initial consultation, the doctor determines you are a candidate for this therapy, he will help you plan a course of action based on your individual case. Regarding the time the treatment takes, Professor/Dr. Rothbart says it varies, but he compares it to the time it takes to correct the teeth with braces.

“It takes time, “ he says. “Typically, the therapy takes from 6 to 18 months. It involves consulting with me or being seen by me 5 or 6 times. Most of my patients find their pain reduced 30, 40, 50% in a week or two.”

“I don’t work miracles,” Professor/Dr. Rothbart says. "But what I can do, when people have this embryological foot structure, is effectively treat it and these people dramatically improve, even if they have concurrent problems.”

Professor/Dr. Rothbart explains that many who have been diagnosed with diseases ranging from fibromyalgia to arthritis and even muscular sclerosis also have Rothbarts Foot Syndrome. “When I normalize the signals being sent to the brain by this embryological foot structure,, the pain gets much better,” the doctor says. “ I haven't resolved the arthritis or lupus or whatever, but the patient feels much better because I have resolved one major source of their pain.

The doctor says that for the most part, traditional medicine focuses on pain management, not resolution of pain.

“One of the reasons I left surgery, ´ Professor/Dr. Rothbart says, “ is because I was so unhappy with the results. I found that many of the patients I gave joint replacements to returned years later with the same pain. “But pain is not the problem,” he says. “Pain is a symptom of the problem. I was treating the symptom. What I wanted was resolution of the cause.”

And the cause, discovered over 40 years of research, is frequently poor posture caused by a twisted foot. If this explanation sounds too simplistic to you, if you don’t believe poor posture could be causing your back or jaw pain, consider this: prior to 1945, correct posture was considered critical to good health. A good deal of medical care involved correcting the posture so that the body could heal itself naturally.

But in 1945, penicillin was discovered, and the entire focus of medical care tuned toward pharmacological treatment. Doctors began to believe, and the public was told, that science could develop “magic bullets’ to cure most anything. There no longer seemed any need for people to be proactive in building good health. And all that information about good posture as the source of good health was lost.

Today, the millions of people suffering from chronic pain stand in testimony to the truth: there is no magic bullet from chronic pain. And Professor/Dr. Rothbart’s research has brought him back full circle to where traditional medicine once stood—pointing toward good posture as the wellspring of good health.

Reading Dr. Rothbart’s new book, “Forever Free From Chronic Pain: the pain sufferers guide to getting your life back,” gave me new insight into why so many people are in chronic pain, and why the traditional medical community is so ill-prepared to treat it. It also gave me hope that for many people, help is finally at hand…or should I say foot?

If you want to explore Dr. Rothbart’s work and see if you might be a candidate for his therapy, you’ll find a vast amount of resources online. Begin with his book web site at Forever Free From Chronic Pain

There you’ll find a vast treasury of information ranging from patient stories to book reviews to interviews with the doctor. Here you can download a free chapter from his book and register for his free newsletter.

At his personal web site, http://rothbartsite.com/ you’ll find more resources, including a blog featuring some of the latest medical research Dr. Rothbart is involved in.

After exploring these resources, if you feel you might be a candidate for the therapy, you can explore the possibility of a long-distance consultation with Dr. Rothbart. In much that same way as many cardiologists now do long-distance consultation, Dr. Rothbart will speak to you by phone, determine if you are a candidate for this therapy and whether or not any tests need to be done. The cost of a long-distance consultation with the doctor, who currently resides in Italy, is 100 Euros, about $125 U.S. Dollars.

If, after the initial consultation, the doctor determines you are a candidate for this therapy, he will help you plan a course of action based on your individual case. Regarding the time the treatment takes, Professor/Dr. Rothbart says it varied for everyone, but he compares it to the time it takes to correct the teeth with braces.

“It takes time, “ he says. “But typically, the therapy takes between 6 and 12 months. It involves consulting with me or being seen by me 5 or 6 times. Most of my patients find their pain reduced 30, 40, 50% in a week or two.”

If you have been going from doctor to doctor, and yet find no relief from your chronic pain, I urge you to look into Professor/Dr. Rothbart's work for yourself.

### Bonnie Boots publishes Pain Health News to provide information and motivation to people living with chronic pain.  You can stay in touch with her by typing your email address into the subscribe box in the upper right corner of this page.

Inside, I found an article titled, "Honey And It's Many Benefits." The brief article began with some historical references to honey being used as a curative, then gave a list of diseases and conditions that can be cured by a mixture of honey and cinnamon. (Their words.)

The second item on the list read, "Arthritis: A study at Copenhagen University had remarkable results by mixing a cup of hot water with two spoons of honey and one small teaspoon of cinnamon powder before breakfast. The combination greatly reduced pain throughout the body."

How I wish that statement were true! Sadly, it is not.

Because it purportedly came from a seemingly trustworthy source, a health magazine referencing a University study, I initially believed the statement that honey and cinnamon reduce the pan of arthritis. The only thing I questioned was the amount of cinnamon being recommended.

I knew that cinnamon in sufficient quantity is a blood thinner. And it seemed to me that taking a teaspoon of cinnamon every day might have serious consequences. So I began a search for the original study from Copenhagen University to confirm the amount of cinnamon.

To my surprise, Google showed me a list of almost 2000 web sites that had published the exact list of "conditions cured by honey and cinnamon."  The magazine had simply lifted it, in total, from one of those sites. A much deeper search showed me that the original source of this oft-repeated article was the Weekly World News, a now-defunct newspaper known for it's reportage on Big Foot sightings, alien abductions and photos of water stained walls seemingly marked with the image of Jesus. The Weekly World News has never been known as a source for legitimate medical research.

A still-deeper search eventually turned up a statement from the information manager of Copenhagen University stating that the University had never conducted such a study and that their name had unfortunately been used to give a feeling of authenticity to spurious advice.

I was furious! I try to be very careful of anything I read on the internet. After all, people can and do say anything. But I'm a little more casual about information I read in printed books and magazines. That's because when I was writing for magazines and newspapers, they all used fact checkers to verify details like "a study at Copenhagen University." Clearly, it's not like that anymore.

I'm appalled that a magazine presenting itself as a trusted source for health information would print a list taken from the internet without doing even a cursory investigation into the veracity of the material. I'm sure someone at the publication decided, "Honey and cinnamon can't hurt anyone, and it might help." But cinnamon, as I've noted, has blood-thinning properties. Neither I nor the publisher of that magazine has any way of knowing what might happen if someone taking prescription blood thinners added a daily teaspoon of cinnamon to their diet.

I learned a good lesson from this incident. I learned that I have to double-check ALL information before I act on it, not just the information I find on the internet.

And I learned that this new magazine isn't serious about being my "most trusted resource for information on living a healthy life." If they were really serious, they'd be making every effort to be sure the information they publish is accurate. My advice  is to check and double-check everything you hear and ready before you act on it, no matter what the source. Your health is just too important!

### Bonnie Boots publishes Pain Health News to provide information and motivation to people living with chronic pain.  You can stay in touch with her by typing your email address into the subscribe box in the upper right corner of this page.

This article, "Phoney Chronic Pain Advice" as sited by the How To Cope With Pain blog in their July Pain-Blog Carnival.

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Because it's adjacent to a large lake, Chicago's winters are always cold and damp, but this winter has been especially brutal. The weather is wreaking havoc with my friend's arthritis, so when Christmas came around, I naturally wanted to send her a gift that would ease her discomfort.

She's been spending a good deal of time on the couch, resting and watching TV, and when I asked what she would like for Christmas, my friend said "Have you seen those ads for the blanket with sleeves? It looks so cozy.  I'd love to have one of those."

If you live in the U.S., you can hardly have missed the television ads for this product. One particular company offers to deliver two of the blankets with sleeves, along with two reading lights,  for under twenty dollars plus the cost of shipping.

At that price, I really didn't expect a quality product. Still, when the package arrived, I had a moment of hoping I would be pleasantly surprised. I was not. When I opened the bag, out slid two thin "blankets" made of the very cheapest kind of fleece. They had a distinctively chemical smell.

There was no way I was going to give this as a gift, but it was what my friend had specifically requested, and with barely a week until Christmas, what was I to do? I turned, as always, to the internet and after some searching, I found my answer–the Nuddle Blanket.

The Nuddle  (NuddleBlanket = Nap + Cuddle)  is exactly what I wanted to give my friend–the blanket equivalent of a warm hug. The Nuddle is made from a luxuriously soft and thick ultra-plush microfiber, so deep and soft you can't resist sinking into it's embrace. It has slits for your arms, as well as a wide outer pocket for your hands. That way, your hands stay warm while you can still easily reach out to hold a book or the TV remote. The Nuddle is long enough to cover your body from your neck to your feet, and it has a pocket at the bottom to keep your feet tucked in. It's altogether warm, cozy and top quality-something that will hold up well for several years of use.

This cuddle blanket was exactly what I wanted for my friend-something to give her an extra measure of comfort and pleasure.

.With Christmas just a week away, I had no time to lose. I sent my friend a big, fancy card telling her Santa would deliver my gift a little late-but it would be worth the wait. When the Nudddle arrived at my house, I packed it up with two paperbacks and some specialty cocoa and took it to United Parcel Service, who delivered it in Chicago two days later. My friend called me immediately to tell me how delighted she was with her gift. And she called again yesterday to tell me how much pleasure she's getting from her cuddle blanket.

"I don't like to lay around in my bathrobe, like I'm sick," she told me. "Now I can be up and dressed, but when I need to rest, I curl up on the couch with my Nuddle. It's so soft and cozy. Just wrapping up in it helps me relax."

It's exactly what I wanted to give her-comfort and joy. And I have the satisfaction of knowing she'll use it for several years.

What happened to the cheap " blankets with sleeves," the ones that looked worn out right out of the bag? I would have spent a total of $16 in postage if I'd returned them ($8 to mail them to me, another $8 to send them back) so rather than throw good money after bad, I donated them to a charity thrift store. That way, at least someone will get some good from them.

If cold and damp add to your pain, check out the Nuddle blanket. I think you'll enjoy it every bit as much as my friend is . Click here to see the NuddleBlanket: Cuddle Up In Comfort It comes with my highest recommendation. After all, it single-handedly saved Christmas!

### Bonnie Boots publishes Pain Health News to provide information and motivation to people living with chronic pain.  You can stay in touch with her by typing your email address into the subscribe box in the upper right corner of this page.