A NEW BOOK BY DR. GURPREET SINGH PADDA, MD, MBA, MHP
Your back is not the problem.
Chronic pain is treated as a worn joint and a bad scan. Most of it is a body running on high insulin, in a fire that never finished — and the pain outlives every procedure aimed at the joint.
22 chapters · 2,291 references · every claim cited
The bill is not the cost.
Ask what chronic pain costs and you are handed a number with a dollar sign. The CDC puts it at 722.8 billion dollars a year. That is the bill. The cost is paid one person at a time, in years: between 1999 and 2023, 67,417 American death certificates named chronic pain as a contributing cause, and the rate rose nearly tenfold.
This book is about why a sore shoulder predicts a metabolic death, why the scan that looks so convincing explains almost nothing, and what it means to treat the terrain instead of the joint.
It tells you where the evidence is weak.
Every chapter has a technical supplement: the primary studies, the numbers with the exact place in the paper they came from, and an honest statement of what each study does not show. Where the evidence is mixed, it says so and gives both sides at full strength. Where a trial argues against the position in the chapter, that trial is printed too.
They are written to be handed to your own physician.
Prefer to watch?
Each of the twenty-two chapters has a video of its own, with the chapter’s own slides, on the Padda Institute channel.
Who wrote this
Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda is an interventional pain physician in St. Louis. He performs the injections and ablations this book examines, and argues that they are a bridge — symptom control that buys the time and mobility to repair the terrain — rather than the whole plan.
The sister book
The Starved Brain follows the same terrain into a different organ: what decades of quiet malnutrition do to a brain, in a population that has never missed a meal. Ten chapters, the same handling of evidence, and a technical supplement behind each one.
If the argument here rings true about your back, that one is about your memory.
Educational material. Not medical advice. If you are in the St. Louis area and want this looked at properly, that is what the Padda Institute is for.