One Autumn Day in 1986
Dr. Ben Daitz: How I met Dr. Janet Travell
An origin story by Dr. Ben Daitz
In the autumn of 1986, I was an attending physician in the emergency department at the University of New Mexico Hospital when a young woman and her one-year-old son were brought in by ambulance. She told me that she had bent over to pick up her baby and collapsed on the floor with excruciating back pain. She was alone, but able to crawl to a telephone and call for help. There was no one to care for her child, so the paramedics brought him as well. The ER nurses were able to call grandparents to come for her baby.
The right side of her back was rigid in spasm, exquisitely tender to palpation, and I remember having to give her morphine and a muscle relaxant to partially relieve her pain. A medical student and I admitted her to our service, and requested a neurosurgery consultation, thinking that she may have herniated a disk. I asked the medical student if she could tell us about the physiology of muscle spasm on morning rounds, because I’d either forgotten or never learned it.
In the morning, she told us about the genesis of muscle spasm, but more importantly brought a paper from the library, The Quadratus Lumborum Muscle: An Overlooked Cause of Low Back Pain, by Dr. Janet Travell, published in the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in 1976. Reading the paper and with help from an anatomy book propped on a bedside table, we were able to very gently examine and then stretch our patient’s Quadratus Lumborum muscle. She was discharged the next day, avoiding, in the years before MRIs, a painful myelogram.
The following afternoon, I summoned the gumption to call Dr. Travell at her office at George Washington University to thank her and ask how I could learn more abut myofascial pain. She very cordially said, “You might start by reading my book, and attending a course I’m teaching in Palm Springs in January.” I ordered the book the same day, and the course she taught with David Simons completely changed the way I’ve practiced medicine for the past 40 years.
I attended several more courses with Dr. Travell, and as a documentary filmmaker I realized that her skill as a superb clinician and teacher really needed to be filmed as an important teaching and learning resource for practitioners. It took a year or two to convince Dr. Travell and Williams and Wilkins, the publisher of Myofascial Pain and dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual to agree, so in the hot, humid, summer of 1991, we brought a production crew from New Mexico to Washington, D.C., and over the course of a week filmed Dr. Travell, indefatigable at 89, and oftentimes stopping production to “fix” a crew member she noticed who was limping or had low back pain.
The Travell Trigger Point Tapes were marketed on VHS by W&W for many years, but after W&W was sold to another company, The Tapes were never converted to a digital format. Thanks to The Janet Travell Foundation, the original Travell Trigger Point Tapes are now digitized and available for on-line streaming. They are a Master Class in clinical medicine by an extraordinary teacher.