Dr. Renee Hartz on American Health Front

American Health Front is a production of medical media group and 2010 productions.

Do you live with constant pain?

Do you have bad posture because it's painful to stand correctly?

Are you taking multiple prescription medications for your pain?

When you look in the mirror, are you surprised at how old you look are?

Is your pain ruling and ruining your life?

Have you ever had a doctor tell you that you can get rid of your pain and get off all your pain medications? We talked with Dr. Renee Hartz, a pain specialist in Oak Park, Illinois. Having been a cardiothoracic surgeon and an emergency room physician, Dr. Hartz has had vast experience in causing and treating all kinds of pain, both physical and emotional.

In her 40 plus years as an MD, she has employed every type of medication and therapy to treat pain. Over the last seven years, she has evolved into a non-drug pain practitioner. In the next few minutes, Dr. Harts and her colleague Craig Paglia will demonstrate how myofascial trigger point therapy and newer forms of electrical stimulation can literally change your life.

The patient comes in with a specific complaint and each time they come to the office, they fill out a map, a diagram of their body, and they circle where their pain is. And depending on the depth of the shading, the darker they fill it in, the more the pain is in that area.

About just under 3% of the people in the country have some form of neuropathy. It's very common in diabetics whether diabetes is truly the number one cause of it is uncertain. There is a large group of patients who get the chemotherapy, who develop horrific neuropathies because the drugs damage the nerves in early neuropathy. If you think of speaker wire, how it's clad with a thin layer of plastic and the wires inside, it's very similar to a nerve.

The nerve is coated with a fatty substance called myelin, and early on the myelin starts to dissolve, and then with worse neuropathy, the nerve itself gets affected in fragments, and pretty soon there's no connection between the nerve and the muscle. The neuromuscular junction's just gone. They feel nothing. So there are grades of neuropathy depending on how much involvement of the coating versus the nerve itself, which is a point at which we can intervene and maybe it's just at the axonal part and prevent them from getting the neural destruction.

All of my patients get extensive, very sophisticated nerve conduction studies with electromyography. The stimulation that we are using, the particular wavelength, the current, everything is designed to improve the microcirculation.

My sister has known that I've had problems with my feet because of the neuropathy. What I have found is I have movement back in my feet that I haven't had in a long time, but a lot of the tingling is gone. The shooting pains are gone, and I feel the color, and I think if nothing else, the circulation is coming back.

Dr. Renee Hart and her team help you feel better so you can live better.