Blogging has been on hold while I went to see my pain management specialist in Manhattan. He’s part of the team at Dr. Portenoy’s Department of Pain Management and Palliative Care at Beth Israel Medical Center across from Union Square.
I am going to try out a couple of new medicines. One is well known, baclofen. It’s a GABA-B agonist, that will, hopefully, do some good via effects on endocrine levels. We’ll see. I haven’t started it yet, as Selchietracker wants to get a handle on how exactly to manage it. It has a lot of side effects, and many of those signs and symptoms of adverse reactions, I have already as part of my illnesses. As one doctor said, I am a complex lady.
The other is flupirtine, a non-opioid analgesic that works on different receptors in the brain. It should also have some neuroprotective effect. That may help with the effects of FTD killing off my brain neurons. It’s not normally available in this country, although it has been available for many years in Europe. It’s now going through the FDA’s obstacle course as a treatment for Fibromyalgia. Selchietracker got a prescription from Germany, and bought it from an internet pharmacy, Goldpharma.com.
After we got back from the trip, I got an alert from the Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome Association (RSDSA). Dr. Portenoy is helping to lead a major push to improve the medical community’s education and understanding of chronic pain, so that we pain suffers will be able to get better treatment. The launch of this effort is a report, A Call to Revolutionize Chronic Pain Care in America, by a private NYC group, the Mayday Fund. According to the report, chronic pain is a greater burden on the health care system “than that of diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined.”
The trip was great. We love Manhattan. We even found a newly reopened gluten-free Greek restaurant, Gus’s, on Bleeker St just a block east of 6th Ave. The food is good and the seats are more comfortable than our old standby for GF, Rissotteria, which is a few blocks up Bleeker toward 7th.
Tags: Chronic Pain, FTD
