One concrete example of what pain treatments were neglegted a decade ago is the article Ramachandran’s Mirror about treating phantom limb pain with mirror therapy:
Ramachandran’s mirror technique is medical school stuff. Everyone knows it. Everyone.
[...]
Of course I knew the significance of the mirror. Of course I knew how to do it. I just never did. It never even occurred to me to do it.
[...]
Sure, it worked, sure, she feels better, sure, she thinks I’m awesome. Why did it take me three years to try something I had known about for ten years with her?
[...]
I can’t understate this: I was thinking about the mirror in her presence, but never thinking about using the mirror. I wasn’t asleep, I wasn’t drunk, I wasn’t inattentive, I wasn’t bored. I was just too much in my world.
So I ask you: did I help her? Or did I make her suffer needlessly for three years?
Without ducking responsibility, what’s wrong with medicine today is that it is predicated on providing treatment, not on reducing suffering. Not on solving problems.
The reason it never occurred to me to use the mirror is because the mirror is not something doctors do. Never mind it is fairly safe. What we do is offer treatments. Medications. Procedures. Not maneuvers.
That’s the kind of thing you are looking for if you want to solve a portion of the chronic pain out there with neglegted methods.
The amazing thing about this story is that it’s about a neglegted treatment for chronic that takes no skill and that students are taught about in medical school.
Once you understand that our medical system is so disfunctional that it doesn’t manage to provide a chronic pain treatment like that to every patient that would benefit from it, it becomes easier to accept that it’s quite plausible that high skill interventions like hypnosis against which there’s a lot of prejudice have no way to be scalled up to reach the patients that would stop being in chronic pain if they would get the treatment.
One concrete example of what pain treatments were neglegted a decade ago is the article Ramachandran’s Mirror about treating phantom limb pain with mirror therapy:
That’s the kind of thing you are looking for if you want to solve a portion of the chronic pain out there with neglegted methods.
The amazing thing about this story is that it’s about a neglegted treatment for chronic that takes no skill and that students are taught about in medical school.
Once you understand that our medical system is so disfunctional that it doesn’t manage to provide a chronic pain treatment like that to every patient that would benefit from it, it becomes easier to accept that it’s quite plausible that high skill interventions like hypnosis against which there’s a lot of prejudice have no way to be scalled up to reach the patients that would stop being in chronic pain if they would get the treatment.