Originally Posted by
GhostRider62
As a fellow chronic pain endurer, I feel for you. One thing.....you don't need a referral to see a Pain Doctor when you are on Medicare. I was able to find an amazing pain mgt doctor (Neuro) who has helped me a lot over the past couple of years. We've tried a lot of things but using radio frequence to ablate or burn certain nerves combined with intralaminar injections have been sufficient to allow me to sleep long enough. No idea what your issues is.....but don't give up finding a specialist who can help you.
I decided on my Pain Mgt doctor because my nurse at family Doc goes there and then I read his Goggle reviews, hundreds of them and almost all effusive in praise.
I just became eligible for Medicare this month, so I have an alternative to the VA. In fact, the pain management clinic I just visited was assigned by the primary care clinic through my Amerigroup plan. I just went with their recommendation, not realizing at the time that it was just a renamed, relocated version of the same pain clinic I'd had a bad experience with in 2018.
But, yeah, I'll call Amerigroup and see whether they offer the same choices as regular Medicare. If I'm recalling correctly, if I opted for regular Medicare my choices are wide open, but there may be some copays and higher costs. I went with Amerigroup because they're associated with Anthem/Blue Cross, etc., and had good reviews. But I'm not sure whether that limits my choices of providers, or whether I can contact specialists directly without a referral.
Anyway, it's a shame this particular pain management clinic is such a racket, because I was satisfied with the actual ortho and spine doctors I visited for evaluations the past couple of weeks. They were both younger guys, in their 30s, obviously fit, and they faced me and just talked, without burying their faces in a computer screen throughout the exam. That's unusual nowadays. With rare exceptions, when I visit the VA clinic and specialists, the clerks, aides, nurses and doctors rarely look up from the screen because they have so many boxes to check off, which hinders genuine patient communication.
And I remembered that this wasn't my first negative impression of this pain management clinic. I was the primary caregiver for my mom during her final decade after she developed Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. She had a lot of pain issues due to a lifetime of arthritis and scoliosis since childhood. As her condition deteriorated I accompanied her on every medical appointment. Over the years I noticed this pain management clinic devolved from prompt and responsive into an obvious insurance-milking racket. Instead of performing immediate "minor" treatments, such as local injections of anti-inflammatories, needing only one visit every six months or so, they created this obstacle course of redundant visits: a consultation, followed by a delay of several weeks; a physical exam, followed by a delay of several more weeks; a third appointment just to explain the upcoming procedure (local injection for pain); a delay of several more weeks before they actually did the procedure.
I see numerous complaints about this clinic on Google, Yelp, etc., over the same issues. Some patients just want pain meds like hydrocodone or Tramadol, which may be perfectly appropriate for some patients. Despite the scare tactics by the government and media, most folks do just fine on relatively mild meds like Tramadol without becoming addicted. But other patients are airing similar complaints about the unnecessary delays that seem to be geared toward milking Medicare, while delaying relatively minor non-surgical procedures for weeks while patients suffer.