Blake Shelley Achieved 50% Back Pain Reduction and Faster Recovery Times

In my adult life, it's the first time I've experienced talking to a medical professional and actually getting a sense that they care versus you're a number that they're trying to push out, and they have a time limit of, "I got ten minutes for this appointment, and then I have a hundred appointments today," and just getting you out, and you don't feel like a number in an assembly line when you're in there. My name's Blake Shelley. I live in Ione, California, and I am a transportation supervisor. I've had pretty severe back issues for thirty-seven now, and I got in a bad motorcycle accident when I was twenty-two or twenty-three. It was always livable, and then the last two years now, it kinda hit a wall where I was just constantly having back issues. It was becoming almost once a month, my back would pretty much go out. I'm stubborn. I always kinda work through the pain. Dr. Demers actually said that was one of the good and bad, a double-edged sword, 'cause I didn't have too much muscle atrophy when I saw her the first time for how bad my injuries were. When I got in the accident, the night of being in the ER, they did X-rays on my full body. I had a cracked sternum that was pretty bad. I still have bone chips in my right toe that move around, and apparently they're too small to go in and remove without causing more damage. At that time, I'll say the name, Kaiser, they would not do an MRI in the emergency room. They said, "Well, nothing's broke. You're fine." And then they told me from neck down, literally there wasn't a spot on my body that wasn't black and blue after the accident. And they said, "Once all the bruising and everything goes away, if anything's still bothering you, come back and see us." And when I finally did go back to the doctor, Kaiser would not do an MRI. They would send me to physical therapy. It would improve a little bit with physical therapy, but never the improvement I was looking for. I've unfortunately had Kaiser my entire life, and you feel like when you go in, they're never actually listening to what you have to say. Dr. Demers, one of the big things is try and shove painkillers down my mouth to fix everything, like Kaiser tried to. She listened to everything I had to say. She's very upfront with me. She definitely didn't sugarcoat anything, which I greatly appreciated. And then as I got into the care with them, they did wanna see me recover and heal, and they knew I was on a limited budget going out of network for care. There was red light therapy, and they actually recently put me on the LifeBase app program, didn't charge me for it, to help me manage my weight and get healthier and stuff, to take some pressure off of my back. And it was truly Dr. Demers and the company wanting to see me get healthy. Pain level's probably in my back forty, fifty percent better. I do have one disc that's basically gone, and she was upfront with me and said, "We can do all the injections in the world and it's not gonna fix a disc that's not there anymore." My recovery's a lot better. I don't necessarily do, like, hard workouts, but I'm pretty physically active. I take the dog for walks pretty much every day as long as the weather's good. It seems like the next day, the recovery, I'm not out for three, four, five days. The pain's still there on a lesser extent, but the ability to recover from a long day seems to improve quite a bit. I would recommend Joint Vitality Institute because they care. They wanna see you get healthy. Dr. Demers is not mainstream. I've actually referred a couple people to them that I know have severe back issues, and I've sent them the link to Joint Vitality and asked for Dr. Demers and all that. Go in for a consultation and just have a conversation with her. See the difference between doing that and going to your main provider that's through your health coverage. Working with a team that actually cares, really good follow-up, hope again of recovering. You know, I'm still not a hundred percent, but I'm getting better. I'm doing my PT regularly, so definitely hope for the future. Even if the injections have healed what they can heal, I can continue to work on my health and my weight and my flexibility and continue with PT and exercise and stuff like that to strengthen my body around the injury. And Dr. Demers has given me a lot of that, too, giving me these structured programs of, "Hey, you can do this program, and if you commit to it, it can make a difference in your health."