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I can't read this article - need a subscription to continue.
Posts: 8981 | From Illinois | Registered: May 2006
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Ann-Ohio
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It is a basic review of Ross Douthart's book, but with lots of good ways to conquer pain. Here is another good one on the same subject. Hope it is readable.
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Still can't access it.
Posts: 509 | From southern new jersey | Registered: May 2003
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Ann-Ohio
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Member # 44364
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Here is the main gist of it>
"Why Modern Medicine Struggles With Treating Chronic Pain And what comes next?
By David Leonhardt Nov. 11, 2021 The New York Times
The mysterious illnesses in the Murray family started with Polly, the mother. During her pregnancies, she suffered fevers, headaches, intense joint pain and a red streak across her face.
Doctors variously diagnosed her with scoliosis and more obscure conditions, and some told her that the problem was all inside her head. “Sometimes people subconsciously want to be sick,” one said. Eventually, similar symptoms afflicted her children and husband.
Millions of people have some idea of the frustrations that the Murrays endured. About one in five Americans suffers from chronic pain, often of undiagnosed origin. Many spend years searching for answers, and doctors — even if they’re more sensitive than some of the Murrays’ doctors — frequently fail to find any.
One of those sufferers has been my colleague Ross Douthat, a Times Opinion columnist. In 2015, Ross began to experience episodes of searing pain that at times left him unable to sleep or function. He has just published a bracingly honest memoir, “The Deep Places,” about these experiences.
Today, Ross is confident that he is a long-term sufferer of Lyme disease, despite initial test results to the contrary. In that way, he has something in common with the Murrays. Their teenage son was one of the first people diagnosed with the disease after it was discovered in 1975. The disease is named for Lyme, Conn., the town where the family moved years earlier, around the time that Polly began suffering her mysterious symptoms.
The lessons from their experiences and Ross’s are relevant far beyond Lyme disease. Both point to problems in American medicine — for all its great achievements — that bedevil people with mysterious pain and illness.
……..American medicine often struggles with subtlety. It treats many conditions as binary: You have it, or you don’t. It fetishizes individual research studies and dismisses broader evidence or logic. (Remember when public health officials told us not to wear masks because no study yet showed them to be effective against Covid-19?)
This overly neat drawing of lines ends up serving many people poorly. It puts too much stock in a negative Lyme disease test, for example, and assumes that the disease’s symptoms cannot persist for years. It imagines that an illness is either real and can be addressed with a pill or treatment — or is strictly a psychological condition."
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