Crooked: Outwitting the Back Pain Industry and Getting on the Road to Recovery—Exposing the System, Reclaiming Your Health 
 
Crooked by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin is a powerful exposé on the multi-billion-dollar back pain industry, revealing how unnecessary surgeries, misleading treatments, and profit-driven medicine have left millions suffering needlessly. This book is highly relevant to the Center for Integrative Neuroscience, as it aligns with our mission to challenge systemic failures in healthcare, expose medical harm, and promote integrative, neuroscience-driven solutions for chronic pain recovery.
 
How This Book Connects to Our Work
✔ Unmasking the Corruption in the Spine Surgery Industry—Crooked reveals how hospitals, device manufacturers, and certain medical professionals push spinal fusions, injections, and expensive interventions despite poor long-term outcomes. These themes parallel firsthand experiences of whistleblowing on unnecessary procedures and industry malpractice.
✔ The Psychological Manipulation of Pain Patients – The book highlights how patients are gaslit, misled, and pressured into high-risk treatments while alternative, non-invasive solutions are dismissed. This aligns with our advocacy for informed consent, patient autonomy, and neuroscience-backed alternatives to invasive procedures.
✔ The Role of the Nervous System in Chronic Pain—Ramin uncovers how stress, trauma, and nervous system dysregulation fuel chronic pain, reinforcing the bioenergetic and neuromodulation-based approaches we promote to restore health without unnecessary interventions.
✔ A Guide to True Healing—Crooked provides actionable steps for escaping the medical-industrial pain trap, exploring movement therapy, neuromodulation, metabolic healing, and mind-body strategies—all of which align with our work in integrative neuroscience, trauma-informed care, and alternative medicine.
 
Essential for Those Who Have Witnessed or Experienced Medical HarmFor those who have personally experienced or exposed the dangers of corporate-driven medicine, Crooked serves as a validation of the systemic failures in pain management and a blueprint for escaping the cycle of ineffective treatments. It reinforces the urgent need for patient-centered, evidence-based care that prioritizes healing over profit.
 
The acclaimed author of Carved in Sand—a veteran investigative journalist who endured persistent back pain for decades—delivers the definitive book on the subject: an essential examination of all facets of the back pain industry, exploring what works, what doesn't, what may cause harm, and how to get on the road to recovery.
 
In her effort to manage her chronic back pain, investigative reporter Cathryn Jakobson Ramin spent years and a small fortune on a panoply of treatments. But her discomfort only intensified, leaving her feeling frustrated and perplexed. As she searched for better solutions, she exposed a much bigger problem. Costing roughly $100 billion a year, spine medicine—often ineffective and sometimes harmful—exemplified the worst aspects of the U.S. health care system. 
 
The result of six years of intensive investigation, Crooked offers a startling look at the poorly identified risks of spine medicine and provides practical advice and solutions. Ramin interviewed scores of spine surgeons, pain management doctors, physical medicine and rehabilitation physicians, exercise physiologists, physical therapists, chiropractors, and specialized bodywork practitioners. She met with many patients whose pain and desperation led them to make life-altering decisions and with others who triumphed over their limitations. 
 
The result is a brilliant and comprehensive book that is not only important but essential to millions of back pain sufferers and all types of health care professionals. Ramin shatters assumptions about surgery, chiropractic methods, physical therapy, spinal injections, and painkillers, and addresses evidence-based rehabilitation options—showing, in detail, how to avoid therapeutic dead ends while saving money, time, and considerable anguish. With Crooked, she reveals what it takes to outwit the back pain industry and get on the road to recovery.