which included physical therapy, chiropractic and/or epidural steroid
injections. If there was no improvement, they gave the patient a
discogram, a diagnostic test to confirm that the disc on MRI was the
cause of the pain. Only if the discogram was positive would they use
the SpineWand to decompress the disc. The presenters claimed that
of all the patients referred by PI attorneys with back or neck pain,
only about 10% ended up being candidates for the SpineWand.
They then explained how personal injury cases worked. Before the
SpineWand, the only options physicians could generally offer to
injured patients were conservative care or open surgery (discectomy
or fusion). Open surgery wasn't appropriate for most patients;
besides, most weren't willing to take that risk. On the other end, con-
servative care didn't have a lot of "value," most patients didn't
improve and these cases didn't settle for very much money for any of
the parties involved. The SpineWand procedure fit right in the middle
and allowed for better patient outcomes and for more cases to settle.
They walked me through a typical case, a car accident in which the
at-fault driver had a $100,000 limit on his insurance policy. In this
case, if the patient was a candidate for the SpineWand procedure, the
case would settle for the full $100,000, with about one-third going to
the medical bills (surgeon, SpineWand, conservative care), one-third
going to the attorney and one-third going to the patient. They
described it as a win-win-win. The patient won because she got better
and received a settlement. The surgeon won because, although he
was risking not getting paid at all, when he did get paid, the payment
was much higher than he would get from private insurance. In some
cases, 10 to 20 times higher. Of course, I came to understand that the
insurance company didn't perceive it this way.
They claimed that when they precisely followed the treatment algo-
rithm and a surgeon performed the procedure (not a pain specialist), on
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