The muscle relaxants did a little and they thought about putting me on Skelaxin. What's an inversion table? I guess you lay on it and it puts you upside down?
And as far as documentation I have a copy of the medical records AND a letter from the DoD acknowledging my injury lol.
The inversion table is just an incline table but instead of being permanently angled like you see inclined bench press or inclined situp equipment in the gym, it is adjustable. The big-5 I went into had about 5 of them on display near the exercise equipment.
Something like this would work, but if possible try it out first or at least make sure it's both strong enough to support your weight, and has the right adjustments to fit you and get you to a reasonable incline angle.
http://www.amazon.com/BODY-POWER-Power-Inversion-Table/dp/B002MTPK70The leg bar length needs to be adjustable, the foot attachment points should be adjustable to account for different foot/ankle sizes, and when adjusted for your height your entire upper body needs to be supported by the padded upper bench. Butt needs to be up on the table part, not left hanging below it. I have a tall upper body so my head goes a bit off the top end of my table, which is not very comfortable, but I managed to jerry-rig something that works. But you will have to adjust the leg bar length to make it so you are balanced good on the table to make it easy to rotate the thing, otherwise you can get hurt with it flipping over one way or the other or being impossible to get back upright
It should be very close to neutral on the balance once adjusted so it doesn't require much strength to rotate. When I balance it out that way for me, my head is just a bit too high on the bench. So if you can test-fit one first that would be best otherwise just don't spend too much on gimmicks. I spent an extra $20 on a heat/massage pad for mine, and I have never used that pad so it was a waste of money.
As for medication, my pain management doc said that skelaxin was the only one he would recommend for me for longer term use since it has low side effects. The stronger ones work faster but mess with the brain too much. There are a couple of ways to deal with back injuries... One is to try to "fix" it (fusion, disc replacement, etc), the other is to go pure pain management which involves everything from massage therapy to drugs to lifestyle changes to electrode inplants to alter pain response. Lots of options and I found the key is to not rush into major treatment options. A good pain mgt doc will start with the absolute minimum treatment possible and work up from there, giving it plenty of time to work. Yea that means longer time without relief but the aggressive treatments can really screw with you and make the rest of your life absolute and literal torture. I think he basically said that if I can walk, I don't need to be cut... Just his opinion but he had me try the inversion table and it worked better than shots or drugs, so...
This is probably enough thread hijack for one day