Get. Better. Faster.: Integrative Sports Medicine as a Transformative Approach to Body, Bone, & Joint Health

By Brad Abrahamson

Integrative medicine, functional medicine, orthopedics, and sport medicine, all integrated into a clear and concise guide for how best to navigate modern medicine -- how to treat underlying causes, rather than getting on the hamster-wheel of medications that only treat symptoms, while simultaneously creating undesirable side-effects, which in turn lead to more medications.

The author, Dr. Brad Abrahamson MD, is a renowned physician with a depth of understanding in numerous treatment protocols, western allopathic medicine, as well as eastern medicine, PRP treatment and real stem-cell therapy -- real as distinguished from all the snake-oil stem-cell quackery -- and this book explains it all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brad Abrahamson
• Release date: Feb 27, 2021

Brad Abrahamson

Bradley S. Abrahamson, MD is a Fellowship Trained Sports Medicine physician with a long-standing interest in bone and joint health. His focus is on helping patients reach their individualized, specific activity goals, whether by restoring knees, hips, shoulders, elbows and all extremity structures.This can start with biomechanical analysis such as gait or throwing analysis, diagnostic ultrasound and physical exam and an accurate history and assessment of individual goals. X-ray and/or MRI is ordered and read personally by Dr. Abrahamson when needed.He also uses innovative methods to clear the inflammation out of a joint and to restore the lining of the joint, the synovium, to a more healthy state. He also has Tenex techniques to clean out unhealthy tendon, leaving behind healthy cells and tissues for healing. He has a unique skill in diagnostic ultrasound including musculoskeletal ultrasound and peripheral nerve entrapment syndromes which often mimic joint pain. In addition to doing various ultrasound-guided procedures, he is certified by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine to do fluoroscopy, an x-ray based guidance system that also improves patient safety in procedures.Dr. Abrahamson constantly studies sports and musculoskeletal medicine, cell science and biochemical topics related to joint health and performance. His education includes an Internship in General Surgery, three years of Orthopaedic Surgery, three years of Family Medicine and the Residency in Sports Medicine adds a Certification of Added Qualification in Sports Medicine to his Board Certification in Family Medicine.Dr. Abrahamson grew up primarily in Colorado but graduated from Medical School with Honors including a Distinction in Research at SUNY-Stony Brook, a well-known medical school on the East Coast. He was named the “Most Outstanding Clinician” for the Class of 1999. He did his General Surgery and the three years of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before changing his focus to Sports Medicine.Dr. Abrahamson lives in Fort Collins with his wife Lara, who is a Family Physician, and his two children.

Book preview

Part I

Core Features of Sports Medicine using an Integrative Approach

Chapter 1

Brad Abrahamson MD

Just recently, at the tail-end of a routine examination in the final part of this anything but routine year—2020—a patient asked me an intelligent and very straightforward question, which, perhaps because of his straightforwardness, caught me off-guard in a good way:

What, my patient asked, are the three most important things I should do to keep my bones and joints healthy?

My answer was this:

Stay light and fit and active

Eat the right micronutrients and maintain a non-inflammatory diet

Check in with physical therapy early and often to help ensure that your movements are biomechanically sound

Sounds good, right? 

Well, I wonder. Maybe it discloses a tendency I’ve long had to oversimplify broader principles and concepts. Maybe also—and this dawned upon me only gradually as later, in the privacy of my own mind, I revisited my response—it disguises a more significant fact: namely, that bone, joint, cartilage, cell, and biomechanical science operate along an endless learning curve, and no one can know everything.

The target is eternally moving. 

And yet it is also true that newly discovered data doesn’t necessarily falsify the previously known—if (and only if) the previously known is accurate to begin with. Newly discovered data elaborates upon the previously known. For this reason it’s always worthwhile to codify and discuss what we know at any given time. The following chapters take on this challenge—and take on as well some of the problems with the American healthcare system and offer solutions at the doctor-patient level.

Chapter 2

Foundational Cracks, Quacks, and Cures

Brad Abrahamson MD

Integrative Sports Medicine is much more than a name; it is a movement.

Increasingly, patients see big medicine as a behemoth—a money-making racket, an unslakable beast grown fat and enormous upon a steady diet of filthy lucre. Trust in doctors has meanwhile plummeted precipitously—and this, in turn, has had unfortunate and even dire consequences, for both doctor and patient alike. Even more unfortunate is the fact that we’ve brought much of the problem onto ourselves: 

Medical school is so expensive that doctors need a generous income to pay off their debts, and this is just one of several reasons our healthcare is so expensive. For-profit health insurance has driven up patient-costs as well — to such an extent that millions of Americans can neither qualify for Medicaid assistance nor afford health insurance. People know that the profits from insurance companies generate huge bonuses for the CEOs of these companies. 

This book will help readers by showing various and sometimes alternative forms of healthcare, along with how best to navigate those various alternatives. 

It will also help readers better understand the care and treatment options available for their specific condition and circumstance, which in turn will increase efficiency (for patient and doctor alike) and at the same time lower overall healthcare costs. 

People want a real healthcare system. They do not want a sick-care system. 

In the United States today, true health-and-wellness medicine barely exists. What we have may indeed be more accurately called sick-care rather than healthcare. It is true that if you’re in the Intensive Care Unit, your goal is to graduate, get out, and arrive back home, stable and healthy, and on this front, American healthcare is strong. It is equally true that in cases of serious illness—or in cases of illness the understanding of which depends on sound science to determine the medications that will best stabilize and treat the illness—then Western allopathic medicine is the clear way to go. Under these circumstances, other types of medical care are essentially adjunctive. And in that capacity, they can be used to augment and improve overall health—and, to be clear at the outset here, this book is not instructing readers to avoid the advice of doctors. 

Still, it’s undeniably true that there are sometimes choices—real choices and real decisions to make—regarding which medical provider to pursue in a given context, as there are also times that patients can safely and effectively care for themselves, given properly vetted information that’s backed soundly by