Viktor Bunin 🛡️🇺🇸@ViktorBunin
How I healed a major L5/S1 disc herniation in a month.
After a weekend trip, I woke up Monday morning at 5am screaming from the worst pain of my life. I made it until 7am, couldn’t take it anymore, and had to go to the ER where I got morphine to take the pain away. The nurse offered me oxy’s and I joked that hasn’t the Sackler family destroyed enough lives? She didn’t laugh; she didn’t know who they were. Nice.
I’ll save you the long story of how I got injured, misdiagnosed & mistreated, etc. and just highlight what I did and what I think worked.
First, I refused to get surgery and you should refuse it as well. Back surgery is a colossal scam and the vast, vast majority of people suffering from back pain heal without it.
I got started by getting a steroidal epidural shot to numb the pain. I avoided it at all costs, but every day I wondered if I was going to end up back in the ER, so I had to pull the trigger. Normally my advice would be not to get it because pain is useful in telling you what you’re doing right or wrong, but here I had no choice.
Next I immediately started doing three things: BPC-157, HBOT, and DRX-9000.
BPC-157 is the most commonly used and well understood peptide. Preclinical studies consistently show that BPC-157 promotes angiogenesis—that is, new capillary growth—in injured areas. Spinal discs have very poor circulation because few blood vessels reach them. My goal in using BPC-157 is that it would promote additional bloodflow and therefore healing to the affected area. It’s a simple daily injection into the stomach and then it finds its way to the correct spot.
Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) is when you lay down in a glass tube and they pump it full of 100% oxygen for about an hour and a half at 2 atmospheric pressures. TLDR is that it oxygenates the crap out of you and makes literally everything about your body better. HBOT is particularly helpful for healing so it’s often used after surgeries and for other wound care. Bryan Johnson recently tried it and said its one of the most effective therapies they've tried.
Combining BPC-157 and HBOT = get blood vessels to the affected area and oxygenate the hell of out of the blood so it maximizes healing properties.
Next I also included lumbar decompression using the DRX-9000 machine. It gently pulls on your hips while keeping your shoulders locked in, thereby decompressing your spine and creating more room between the vertebrae for the herniated disc to slowly make its way back to its place (rather than intruding on the nerves).
After a month of doing these three treatments nearly daily (which took A LOT of time), I was close to pain free. I still had weakness in my left leg and couldn’t carry heavy things, but the progress was insane. At that point I did Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) where they take plasma from your blood and inject it near the disc in order to help reabsorb some of the extruding disc material. I then did another session of PRP a month later.
It’s now been 3 months since the ER visit and while I’m still not at 100%, I can carry my kids, run for short distances, and comfortably go to the gym. I was told it would take a year to heal, but I feel like everything I did in the first month was insanely impactful to accelerating my progress. I don’t know what was most impactful, but if I had to rank it based on totally subjective criteria, I would say: HBOT, BPC-157, PRP, DRX-9000.
Hope this helps folks! I am not a doctor whatsoever. There’s no research articles pointing to this combination of treatments' efficacy in treating herniated discs. I’m just sharing what worked wonders for me in case it’s helpful to others.
