There are promising ways to manage chronic pain so people, when they do feel pain, aren’t so bothered by it. In fact, a creative study led by a neuroscientist, Susanne Becker, uses insights from Ivan Pavlov to show the possibility of uncoupling the sensation of pain from the experience of pain. More here
Imagine your physician prescribed an expensive new drug for you. Concerned about its price, you ask what your out-of-pocket costs will be. To help your physician, you even pull out details of your insurance coverage. But even with this information in mind, don’t expect your physician to be able to estimate your costs. The complexity…
The experiment was simple. A group of behaviorally-minded researchers tested whether patients are more likely to receive mammograms when those tests are automatically scheduled (meaning they can opt out if they want) versus when they have to opt in for the tests. Automatic scheduling should have increased mammograms. It didn’t. In one respect, it even…
Many people with chronic pain find themselves interacting with clinicians who do not seem to trust them. Why is it hard to establish a trusting relationship with your doctor? And what can you do about it? I have been on both sides of the exam table – as a physician caring for people with chronic…
During his campaign, President Trump promised to “end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.” In honor of that promise, Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Medicare program, should address the enormous increase in what Medicare patients are being asked to pay for drugs. Medicare drug coverage is…
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, millions of people receive generous subsidies to cover the cost of health insurance. Some people, in fact, receive coverage for free, their monthly premiums paid in full by the federal government. Unfortunately, even a small change in price can cause people to lose their coverage. That’s important…
We all know what “a complainer” is: it’s a person who finds the dark side of everything, who turns a casual conversation starter—“How are you doing?”—into a somber soliloquy about all the (usually minor) problems making their life unbearable. Too often, people with chronic pain are viewed as complainers by friends, family, and even their…
Anyone who has raised kids knows what happens when you give them a monthly allowance without requiring any work in return: they plop in front of their new videogame consoles while their dirty dishes collect in the sink. That’s the logic behind Republican plans to establish work requirements for people who receive safety net benefits—if…
I am going to be writing about chronic pain: diagnosis, treatment, mistreatment, etc, in upcoming posts. In my first post, i describe part of my own pain journey. The post is here. And it starts with me standing “in the back of the conference hall panicked that I was going blind.”
Your father’s rheumatoid arthritis medicine was working well, fighting off that otherwise debilitating illness. Then he found out that Medicare would no longer pay for the drug. Your aunt’s multiple sclerosis was flaring and her neurologist recommended a promising new treatment. But she learned that she would have to try, and “fail,” on two other…