Richard Mayers Facebook ad: “Read this if sciatica is stealing your life”

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I had a lumbar fusion at the Cleveland Clinic in 2022 after eight months of oral magnesium from Costco that did absolutely nothing. My blood levels came back perfect. The surgery cost me $4,800 out of pocket after Medicare. It worked for eleven weeks. I'm sixty-seven. Last month they recommended the same surgery for my wife. I read an article. I cancelled her referral. I want to explain how. My name is Richard. I'm sixty-seven. I retired in 2023 after thirty-four years with the United States Postal Service in Cincinnati, the last twelve as a route supervisor at the main processing facility on Dalton Avenue. I spent my career doing one thing. I figured out, mechanically, why a route that was supposed to be working was not working. When something fails repeatedly on a delivery route you don't need a new truck. You need to look at the variable nobody has measured. In 2021 the burning started down my own right leg. Standard pathway. Primary care doctor. Ibuprofen 600mg three times a day. Six months in, my stomach started bleeding. Gastroenterologist added Prilosec. Year two: my wife Linda, who taught third grade for thirty-one years before she retired, started me on Nature Made magnesium glycinate from Costco. Forty-six dollars a bottle. She'd read it in an AARP Bulletin article. Eight months. $368 spent. My primary care ordered the blood panel. Magnesium 2.1 milligrams per deciliter. Optimal range. The burning down my leg was the worst it had ever been. I sat in my truck in the Costco parking lot for forty minutes after that appointment. I had been swallowing a mineral for eight months. The blood was perfect. The pain was worse. None of it added up. By March 2022 the orthopedic spine surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic recommended a lumbar fusion. L4-L5-S1. Two levels. He went through the consent form. Risks. Recovery time. Insurance approved it on the second appeal after the first denied for "inadequate documentation of conservative treatment failure." The surgery was in August 2022. I want to be honest about what happened next, because I do not want any other husband or wife reading this to make the decision I made. The fusion stabilized the joint. The acute burning down my right leg eased for about eleven weeks. Then it came back. The Cleveland Clinic literature is clear about this. Approximately thirty to forty-six percent of lumbar fusion patients experience some degree of failed back surgery syndrome within twelve months. The Mariner database study of one hundred and two thousand patients found 8.4 percent diagnosed with FBSS within the first year alone. Nobody had handed me those numbers before I signed the consent form. I had two surgical scars. Three months of recovery. Eight weeks off everything. $4,800 out of pocket after Medicare. And by November 2022 I was back on ibuprofen, back on Prilosec, back on the daily Costco magnesium. The locked muscle around the nerve root was still locked. Removing the disc bulge and fusing the joint had addressed the structural problem. The compensatory muscle lock and the inflammation around the surrounding tissue, which had built up over four years of compression, had never been addressed at all. I had been operated on at one of the top spine programs in the country. And the variable that actually mattered had never been measured. In January 2025 Linda's burning started. Same leg. Right side. Down to the heel. She did exactly what I had done three years earlier. Aleve at the primary care. Prilosec when her stomach started bleeding. The fourteen-week wait for outpatient physical therapy and the four photocopied diagrams. Two epidural injections at the Cleveland Clinic pain management center. The first lasted six weeks. The second eleven days. Eight months of Costco magnesium that her own doctor confirmed had optimized her serum levels to no effect on the burning. By October 2025 the orthopedic spine surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic had recommended a lumbar fusion for her. Insurance had approved it. The surgery was scheduled for July 2026. I sat in the consulting room with her and I listened to him explain the procedure I had already had. I did not say anything in the appointment. I did not want to override her decision. We drove home on I-71. She didn't say anything either. I sat at our kitchen table that night and I did the math again, this time for her. The exact same calculation I had done for myself in 2022, except this time I knew where to look. Three days later our daughter Karen, who works as a hospital administrator in Columbus, sent me an article. She had read it because she had been worried about her mother for months. The article was written by a retired spinal surgeon from one of the major US academic medical centers. Thirty-two years on the spine service. His own wife had been on the exact same protocol I had been on, and Linda was now on. His son James was a chemical engineer in pharmaceutical manufacturing. He had spent three days at their kitchen table doing the math I had done in 2022 without knowing the answer. Less than one percent of an oral magnesium dose ever reaches the deep muscle compartment around an irritated sciatic nerve. Less than one percent. Eight months of swallowing a mineral. The bloods looked optimal because the bloodstream had been optimized. The paraspinal muscle at L4-L5, the tissue that had been locked for four years, the tissue that was actually compressing my nerve, had received almost none of it. The math was simple. Oral magnesium has maximum bioavailability of 20 to 30 percent. What enters circulation distributes across total body water. The paraspinal muscle at L5-S1 represents approximately 0.3 percent of total body muscle mass. The fraction of an oral dose that reaches that specific tissue in therapeutic concentration is negligible. For thirty-four years at the postal service I had taught route supervisors that when delivery fails repeatedly it is almost never because the truck is wrong. It is because nobody has measured the variable that mattered. The blood test for magnesium had never been measuring the place that hurt. Not for me in 2022. Not for Linda in 2025. The lumbar fusion had addressed the structural compression. It had never addressed the locked muscle starving the nerve, or the inflammation that had built up over years, or the nerve sheath that had been compressed for so long it needed feeding to repair. I had been operated on for a problem that the operation could only partially solve. And the recurring failure of the protocol was, mechanically, not a clinical mystery. Here is the part nobody had explained to me at the consent appointment. There is no billing code for magnesium applied through the skin. A lumbar fusion generates roughly sixty to ninety thousand dollars in facility and surgical fees. A cortisone injection generates a thousand dollars every quarter and Medicare pays eighty percent. An oral prescription generates a refill every thirty days. A topical preparation applied at home, that addresses the inflammation and the locked muscle compartment directly, generates nothing recurring. The economics of the four are not comparable, and the system reflects that. This isn't bitterness. The Cleveland Clinic team treated me with respect and professionalism. The system they worked inside was not built to recommend what wouldn't bill. The lotion that the retired surgeon and his son had developed used clinical-grade magnesium chloride applied directly through the skin, with arnica and MSM, through a peppermint-derived menthol carrier that pulls all three two to three inches deep into the soft tissue where the actual problem sits. Nothing going through the stomach. Nothing going through the kidneys. The mineral reaching the locked muscle without touching the systems that the oral route was destroying. Twenty dollars. Twice a day. Sixty seconds. I ordered two bottles the same evening. One for Linda. One for me, three years after my own surgery that had only partially worked. They arrived on a Wednesday. Linda's first night, she rubbed it in before bed. She slept four uninterrupted hours on her right side. The first time in five months. Day seven, she stopped the evening Aleve. Day twelve, morning Aleve gone. Prilosec in the kitchen trash. Day nineteen, she walked from our house to the end of our cul-de-sac and back. Three-quarters of a mile. The first time in nine months. I went with her to the pre-op assessment at the Cleveland Clinic in February 2026. The surgeon repeated the examination. He measured range of motion. He looked at the most recent MRI which had been done as part of the pre-op workup. He looked at her and he said: "Mrs. Henderson, your inflammation around the nerve root has reduced. I would be reluctant to recommend surgery on a back that has improved this much in six months." Linda asked if she could come off the surgical schedule. He said yes. I called his scheduling office the next morning. The coordinator asked me twice if I was sure. I am writing this because I had the surgery I would not now recommend to my own wife. And because the variable nobody had measured for me in 2022 was the same variable nobody had measured for Linda in 2025. I am still on the lotion myself. Three months in. The post-surgical burning that had come back in 2022 is now finally easing for the first time since the fusion. My buddy Frank from the postal service. Sixty-eight. Had two epidural injections eight months apart. The second one lasted eleven days. Was scheduled for a microdiscectomy in May. Three weeks on the lotion. Called me on a Sunday morning. "I cancelled the surgery consult." My neighbor Jim. Seventy-one. Retired electrician. Six months of magnesium supplements from Walgreens. Levels perfect. Sciatica unchanged. Same story I had. Two weeks in. Sleeping through the night. Hadn't done that without waking from pain in two years. I am sixty-seven and I spent thirty-four years figuring out why delivery routes failed, and I am writing this to say that the system fails when the variable that matters is never measured. Not in postal logistics. Not in spine care at the Cleveland Clinic. The article is here. The article I wish I'd read in 2022 before I signed the consent form, and three years later before they nearly operated on Linda too. https://getrevivecare.com/pages/adv-back-pain-md9-nerve-lotion READ THIS. Richard. Cincinnati, March 2026

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Read this if sciatica is stealing your life

REVIVE CARE