Do you don’t want people to avoid tests or treatment because of a $3,000 medical bill?

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Coronavirus shows the importance of Bernie Sanders & Medicare for All.

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In a pandemic, you don’t want people avoiding getting tested or treated because they can’t afford a $3,000 medical bill. A lot of working families cannot afford that.

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We’re only as safe as the least insured person among us. Everyone has to be covered.

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One American man who flew back from Wuhan with his small daughter was hospitalized at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego for several days until the daughter tested negative for coronavirus. After living in Wuhan for 15 years, he did not have American insurance.

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Our CDC had no test kits available so it took many days for results to be flown to CDC and returned. England has now tested 10,000 people on national health insurance. We have tested 420 but many people were untested as kits were not available and they are in our communities spreading the highly contagious virus.

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What is the cost of high-level bio-containment units that function like ICU’s? My guess is that 6 days would easily be $60,000 if not far more.

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This poor man.

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One business man in Florida paid $3500 for a test to prove he was well after flying back from China so he did not have to quarantine for two weeks. His insurance refused to pay. Will yours pay for testing of your family?

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The material on this site is for informational purposes only.
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It is not legal for me to provide medical advice without an examination.

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It is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment provided by a qualified health care provider.

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For My Home Page, click here:  

Welcome to my Weblog on Pain Management!

Please ignore the ads below. They are not from me.

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The advertising below is not mine.

In exchange, this blog is less expensive.

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Anger

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Anger at the failure of our medical system to support research and treatment of pain, anger at failure of the few currently available analgesics, anger at lack of interest or funding from Pharma – it requires at least $10,000,000 more to finish one important human treatment before submitting to FDA – that’s just one study. Pharma does not care, the price is peanuts to them. At one point, a company bought it, intending only to bury it. They do that for rheumatology treatments too, both the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system are being ignored. What could be more powerful than the immune system?

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Anger

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Anger at the failure of most medical organizations to discuss cannabis, medical marijuana. Training in cannabis is imperative.

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I am thrilled that Scripps Memorial Hospital Grand rounds in 10 days is a one hour lecture by the doctor who is head of HelloMD, national leaders in physician approval for medical marijuana, and in education.

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Anger at the destruction of the field of pain management. I posted on this two days ago, top left column. Anger at the greed in the medical system where pharma can buy whatever they want by sprinkling money at congress who will never ever ever do anything about the unholy prices of drugs. Certain elements in power will never stop trampling on the poor and the disabled. They will never treat the addicts. There is no will, they are paid off and nobody wants to help the disabled, the unwell, the poor. Not in  the U.S. Voters do not want to hear it.

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Anger says step back, surrender.

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There is nothing anyone can do. The swamp is exhausting, dirty, dangerous and black.

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I have tried 7-1/2 years to introduce a new paradigm. At various lifetimes in medicine, I have had funding, sat on boards of companies, and panels at FDA. I have witnessed the destruction of what it once was 43 years ago when I entered practice. A long and tortured history, but still the most exciting thing in the world is medicine, science. So what? They shut off the field of pain and are killing it. The world is the world. Always was, always will be. Lust and greed, says the sage. You cannot uncurl the curly tail of a pig, says the sage. Always was, always will be. Do your duty. You cannot escape it. But surrender to love.

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Surrender. Do what you can and surrender the results to the Infinite.

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Read these books:

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Dying to Get High, Marijuana as Medicine

by Wendy Chapkis and Richard J. Webb

NYU Press 2008

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From back leaf:

“How can a substance that is no mystery to half of all adults in the United States prompt such confusion and misrepresentation in the realms of law, medicine, and policy?…. Offering nuance in place of slogans, Dying to Get High tells an inspiring story of the tactics and philosophies of a little-understood health movement.”

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“A beautifully written account from the front lines of the struggle between a federal drug war complex determined to keep demonizing marijuana and the growing movement of patients and doctors who have found marijuana to be a valuable medicine.”

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“….. Provides a human element to the history, pharmacology, psychology, and politics of medical marijuana in a way that no other work has. I loved reading it.”

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Heroin Century

by Tom Carnwath and Ian Smith

Routledge Press, London

2002

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This is an extremely important, amazingly interesting, readable book for everyone.

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From back cover:

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Is heroin really dangerous? Or Is it just dangerous because it is illegal?

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Page-one 93,

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“The income of the drug barons is an annual $254 thousand million dollars, greater than the American defense budget.”

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Read this book. A page turner! Exciting! fast paced, awesome! mind boggling!

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And just because you might flash some anger to propel you to actually do something, don’t get stuck there. Be at peace. Work hard. Use your expertise. Surrender to the Infinite.

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While you are thinking about it, tell Congress to make pain management a mandatory course in more than the current 3% of medical schools, less then 30 hours in 4 years. Fund research and treatment of neuropathic pain such as CRPS, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome because it can be so disabling – the same neuropathic pain can occur from strokes. Don’t we deserve better? Not even cancer pain is taught, let alone grade schoolers who should be taught about the body, about addiction, drugs, sex. Teach all that opioids cause pain because they trigger inflammation in the immune system and that stimulates pain. The more opioid you give, the more the pain. Teach about the brain’s pleasure centers and addiction, how drugs and food and cigarettes work there and how addiction kills.

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Have a wonderful life all of you. There’s a lot of work to take up. You will meet great people. Can’t wait to see what a little anger will do.

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The material on this site is for informational purposes only.

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It is not legal for me to provide medical advice without an examination.

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It is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment provided by a qualified health care provider.

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Comments are welcome.

This site is not for email, not for medical questions, and not for appointments.

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For My Home Page, click here:  Welcome to my Weblog on Pain Management!

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Please IGNORE THE ADS BELOW. They are not from me.

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Spinal Cord Stimulators – comment on RSD

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Spinal Cord Stimulators 

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 Craig’s comment

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By no means do I mean to say that I or anyone else has better insight into how to treat pain, but I am against spinal cord stimulators [SCS’s] for treatment of pain due to CRPS, and possibly against use in other situations. I demand that the billions in profit they made be put into a retrospective and prospective study of damage caused by them in order for them to give full informed consent.

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I have 3 goals writing this.

1. SCS’s

2. Craig’s experience

3. The Only Real Answer for severe pain, not damaging the system with opioids
   

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Informed consent is never given for spinal cord stimulators because it requires truth telling, something our corporations have been reluctant to do. Business ethics are not medical ethics, as we keep being reminded daily in the headlines.

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I enclose, below, a generously expressed and detailed comment by a man who had the patience to sit down and  write the painfully gory details so you can weigh-in on your decision whether to follow your pain specialist’s opinion to give you one. I don’t want anyone to feel suckered into choosing them and if I had pain I’ll admit I’d crave relief too. Anything. I’d be in line before the doors open.

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But if you have CRPS, spinal cord stimulators will create more pain. CRPS evolves unpredictably, by a will of its own. I know some very desperate patients with CRPS everywhere including face, mouth, gums, tongue, organs, trunk, limbs. Spinal cord stimulators will create more pain. Keep in mind, I don’t see the 5 year success stories even for lumbar disc pain. They don’t need me if they are pain free.

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But if you have CRPS and desperate need for pain relief because all else has failed — every known drug in highest possible doses of ketamine, propofol, opioids for weeks in ICU fail to even touch pain— there is one thing, and only one thing to do and I will set it out below. I just sent my recommendation to a patient with CRPS in extreme pain.

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My recommendation, below, is for patients who have nowhere else to turn.

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First I’ll mention the problems Craig encountered with SCS’s. He sent his comment to the opening page of this blog, so I will reproduce below. 

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I am currently undergoing a trial Medtronic SCS. I have had to have it reprogrammed 3 times since it was installed 5 days ago. I have had sensations and issues that I have addressed with my rep and my neurosurgeon. I get a severe headache when the unit is turned on. I get the constant feeling of having to urinate. I have current running through my testicles which they can not seem to program out and I am getting little pain relief. I have had to failed back surgeries, many failed injections and I have CRPS. The leads that were inserted when I was in the table covered my mid back and both legs. After I got to my feet and waited while they programmed the unit in another room. They came in and plugged it in and I no longer had coverage on the right side. My crps is in both legs, my hands, arms and face. The lyrica helped to tamp down some of the burning but I am in pain 24/7 and this was my last resort. I have scar tissue completely surrounding my S1 nerve. By the grace of God, I am on my feet, on crutches. I seem to get a look of disbelief when I tell them the unit is causing these issues or it’s not giving me the relief I was counting on. Relief, only to cause greater issues and pain. Is not relief to me. I can not wait to get this trial out of my back. I believe the leads slipped and that is why I am not getting the full coverage I had on the table. The issues I have had are as follows: severe headache, constant feeling of having to urinate, extreme joint pain, abdominal pain, sleeplessness, involuntary jerking, surges in current even when sitting still. Intense pain around the lead insertion site. Current uncomfortably running through my testicles, regardless of setting. It is my opinion there is still not a lot known about crps and I have read evidence of people have great success with these units. Everyone reacts differently. My body obviously creates a lot of scar tissue and my orthopedic surgeon created a fair amount herself. I can’t imagine even more or being forced into a chair for yet another unlucky decision. The medication helps and I have lived this far without the optimism that it would end soon. I had high hoed for this device but I don’t think it is right for me.

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One of my patients with CRPS was hospitalized for weeks with recurring unusual abscesses and required repeated surgery of hand and forearm. Even before surgery, she had failed opioids, failed ketamine, and was in ICU for weeks and weeks while the same medications were still given along with Propofol and IV Tylenol. Nothing helps her extreme pain.

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Anesthesiologists on staff in ICU threw everything they had at the pain for weeks. Most anesthesia pain doctors would have probably done what they did because that is the limit of tools we have.

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When you have hit the limit of benefit from opioids, ketamine, propofol, we have nothing else that treats pain with one exception: drug holiday.

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Stop all analgesics including Tylenol that destroys the liver as severely as cancer, the severity of which was newly discovered and published yesterday.

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The receptors for these analgesic drugs have up-regulated to such an extent they have caused the situation. Again, I stress, everything that was done during the ICU admissions would be done by any anesthesiology pain specialist. Those are the only tools. They cause the problem. The same for opioid induced hyperalgesia. We used to do it with Parkinson’s drugs in the 80’s.

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The only way to rehabilitate the up-regulation of all those receptors that have now exploded in numbers, immune to anything you throw at them, is stop the drugs.  Stop all of them for weeks, maybe months, years, no one knows, you are all the human guinea pig waiting to happen. But if we restart them, how long do we wait, how quickly will it again lead to this massive hyper-excitable state of pro-inflammatory cytokines that we know have gone wild, flooding the CNS. A flooded engine will not restart.

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Ketamine at least is known to reduce pro-inflammatory cytokines, but the system is too busy exploding, birthing new receptors that take over, and you’ve got a 55 car pile up. Well, more like millions I’d guess. No scientist here. Clnically, when can we resume something after a drug holiday, how soon and which drug? I’d avoid opioids because they create more pro-inflammatory cytokines. Choose ketamine, because they reduce pro-inflammatory cytokines, but if it works at all, stop it at first sign of tolerance, which is the need for increased dose. It becomes less effective. Walk a fine line, endure more pain because unless you do, it will no longer help. Opioids, analgesics of many kinds. 

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How do we get you through a drug holiday because we know withdrawing these drugs will trigger even more pain for possibly weeks until the system settles down?

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Pain storms, hurricanes

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This is complex regional pain syndrome where we see this insanity of pain storms. There is no other condition, unless several neuropathic pains in people with cancer, nowhere I have seen this type of pain in decades except CRPS – comparable to pain of subarrachnoid hemorrhage, blinding pain.

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No one has answers. None. One university does outpatient infusions of ketamine six hours daily for 8 to 12 weeks. Does it help? A small percentage. Outpatient, 6 hours daily, 5 days a week, staying at a hotel, 8 weeks.

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This is CRPS/RSD. No one has answers. It is futile to throw more of the drug in the system. That is my opinion. You have a choice and may choose otherwise. It is your body. You may stay on monthly opioids for decades, until you finally admit how poorly they work. A drug holiday is what we did in the 70s during my ancient training with Parkinson’s patients. They needed full 24-hour support. The American medical system has changed since then and those are not options currently available—cost.

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You need full psychological and psychiatric support.

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The Only Real Answer

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The country needs to invest $10 million to complete the clinical trials needed for an injectable, long-lasting interleukin 10 [IL-10], the anti-inflammatory cytokine. It already has full scientific and animal studies performed by and with the world’s foremost glial scientist at University of Colorado Boulder. Professor Linda Watkins has won awards from many countries. She has been the keynote speaker at the annual academy pain meetings for years. IL-10 can relieve pain for three months in animals that have intractable chronic neuropathic pain. This is not new —–NIH I’m looking at you to fund clinical trials. And those of you who care, do a Kickstarter to fund the clinical trials.

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This is the power of the innate immune system. NIH would rather fund research on the unknowns like stem cells rather than the known. It’s known for decades, NIH does not like to fund pain research. Glia are not all about pain. They are the innate immune system, the key to Alzheimer’s, neurodegenerative diseases, almost all known disease including atherosclerosis. It’s all about inflammation. We need the trials to stop giving drugs that cause inflammation, opioids —–CDC fiats are not as good as a drug that relieves pain, a drug that really works on mechanism. Where will the addicts go if the ER only has IL-10 for pain? That is one way to overspend on ER visits.  And NIH, please get us some real clinical research funding on how to use glia for our benefit. Get us some research on the entourage effect, combining medications to achieve relief especially for neuropathic pain.

Then bring on some crack negotiating teams from insurers to do some negotiation about pharmaceutical prices. Our new president has mentioned that.

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Please bring this to everyone’s attention. One way to get a grip on pain and/or depression is to build hope, help others, and energize behind a goal.

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Kickstarters work to raise tens of millions overnight. 

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IL-10 – animals have been shown to be pain free for three months, already proven in animal studies, by one of the world’s most widely acknowledged pain specialists Professor Linda Watkins, PhD. We need the final steps to fund the clinical trials in humans.

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The material on this site is for informational purposes only.
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It is not legal for me to provide medical advice without an examination.

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It is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment provided by a qualified health care provider.

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This site is not for email and not for appointments.

If you wish an appointment, please telephone the office to schedule.

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For My Home Page, click here:  Welcome to my Weblog on Pain Management!

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Please IGNORE THE ADS BELOW. They are not from me.

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Rectal Suppository Morphine – the only opioid on formulary

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CDC Opioid Guidelines

Day #1

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One patient’s formulary changed with Blue Shield of CA and the ONLY opioid now available to her without a prior authorization is rectal suppository morphine. 

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I almost choked on my wheatberries on this one.

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 — addicts would  love them. Patients, not so much.

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Be warned people. 

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Is that 6 suppositories every 3 hours?

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This site is not for email.

If any questions, please schedule an appointment with my office.

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The material on this site is for informational purposes only.

It is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment

provided by a qualified health care provider.

Relevant comments are welcome.

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For My Home Page, click here:  Welcome to my Weblog on Pain Management!

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