The headline of this article from the Detroit News says it all: Chronic Pain is a Headache for Doctors, Patients: There are Many Treatments, and Some Even Work. The article explores pain medicine as a relatively new field and the holes in knowledge about what causes it, how it works and how to treat it.
It’s hard to not feel like a guinea pig and, sometimes, hard to believe that your doctor knows how to treat your pain. I think that headache patients are truly able to be partners with their doctors because there are so many unknowns. Of course, a lot of docs respond to the unknowns with defensiveness or bullheadedness, which angers patients and eliminates any chance for cooperative learning….