This is a fascinating story of the continuous and intensive personalized care (e.g. daily injections, hormones, opioids etc.) President Kennedy received from then #1 world pain specialist that allowed him to function and lead the country. 50 years later and you still wont get even close to the same level personalized pain care in Finland (or many other country). The story is a tribute to Ms Janet Travell - a highly intelligent then #1 pain specialist in the world with research background and experimental mindset. I have seen some 50+ doctors in Finland and some in the US. A handful of them are very good at their own disciplines, none of them is even mediocre in mastering pain which would necessitate mastering in-depth (from pain management perspective) 10+ different frameworks or leading (a world-class) multi-disciplinary team in a co-ordinated manner. Luckily, I believe that advances in neurochemistry, understanding how pain works, genetics and microbiology will allow mere mortals diagnose and treat hundreds of pain conditions at scale in a much more elegant manner in the near future (ten to thirty years). Amongst many other things, this will mean that current broad diagnosis like Myofascial Pain will be subdivided into tens or hundreds of different variants based on the underlying root cause (e.g. various cellular level metabolic dysfunctions / dysregulations driven by specific genes). Thats going to be exciting!
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 06:40:06 +0000