Emory Hubbard

A patient once sat across from me in my exam room, glanced at the bookshelf behind me, and said, “Doc, I just don’t have your discipline.” He was looking at a copy of one of my first books, “Dr. T’s Drop the Fat Diet,” which features a before-and-after photo on the cover. The “after” image shows a six-pack I built through years of focused effort. To him, that cover was proof of some inherent difference between us, a determination or strength of mind he assumed he simply didn’t have.

During my residency, while rotating through the spinal cord unit at the VA Hospital in Puerto Rico, I cared for young veterans who, to my surprise, had, in most cases, adjusted remarkably well to a new reality: they would spend the rest of their lives in a wheelchair. I remember one case, in particular. I recollect this case well because the patient was the unofficial Don Juan of the unit. He had several gorgeous girlfriends, among them some of the nurses. He flirted, he laughed, he lived intensely.

I remember my early years in interventional physiatry with a clarity that only comes from repetition. A young patient, often in their twenties or thirties, would walk in with a single, unremarkable complaint: axial low back pain, non-radiating. The exam told a consistent story: pain reproduced with extension and rotation, no radicular findings, and no neurological deficits. Imaging was equally quiet: maybe a mildly bulging disc, some early facet hypertrophy, nothing alarming.