San Francisco DRX 9000 Back Pain patients want to know: When will I start feeling better ? When will I know if this is working ?

It's normal to expect instant gratification, it's just the way we are wired. Sometimes you get it after the first session on the DRX 9000, sometimes the second or third. And sometimes it just takes a while. It is fairly common to get sore in the beginning. Really, the only thing consistent about what happens in the beginning is that it is inconsistent. The goal of the first session is to have you feel nothing more than a slight sensation that something is happening. Then, the next day we ask you how you feel. Based on what you say, we either raise the pounds of pull up by 5 or 10lbs. We do this until we reach half your body weight less 10lbs. (your target pull). Once we reach the target pull, we may decide to go higher or lower based on our clinical judgment. Some people actually fall asleep during the treatment. Some people get a little sore during the treatment (in the beginning), and everything in between. What matters is how you feel in the end. If the machine could make people better in a few sessions then that would be the protocol, not 20-24 sessions. So, the moral of the story is to just relax, focus on your home care, and let the treatment process unfold. There are three basic qualities to symptoms, frequency, duration, and intensity. Your pain will most likely not just vanish overnight, although that does actually happen more often than you would think. The more likely scenario is that you will notice the intensity of your pain has subsided a little. Then, when it does become intense, it does not last as long. Or maybe it is not as intense as often. Stuff like this. But, when you multiply these subtle changes in the quality of the symptoms over time, it adds up to a big change. Yes, we want to know how you are doing the whole way through. This is why you fill out the Symptom Questionnaire and Pain Diagram each visit. But in the beginning, anything is possible. So don't get hung up on this. Just relax and focus on making the necessary adjustments to your lifestyle. Here is a partial list of the things to pay attention to: plant based diet, shoes you wear, cervical pillow, omega3 fatty acids, back support, stress levels-meditations, computer use in hunched over position, lifting more than 5-10 lbs repetitively, drinking 80-100 oz of water, driving long distances, standing/sitting for long periods. If you have any questions about what you should or should not be doing, ask any of us. We are here to help.