Blessings in Chronic Pain. Patient, Doctor, Plan.

Chronic pain touches much. Art, science, never-ending experiment. Patient, doctor, plan. Gratifying when it works. Chat with Dr. David Edwards, pain specialist.

Proem

Where do I make the most choices about my health? I have multiple sclerosis. I make choices about function, activity, pain, food, and mood all day, every day. Ok, I exaggerate, many times a day. How do I support myself in making these choices? I experiment, I track stuff, I worry, I connect and consult. As a person, I approach these choices for myself, sometimes with other individuals. Always as an experiment of one. On the other hand, clinicians work with thousands of people making choices, thinking first about people as a group aand then as individuals, or the other way around. An assumption of people who work on computerization of clinical decision support, CDS, (making medical choices) is that computerization will help clinicians make the decisions faster or more in alignment with research and guidelines. I like to question assumptions. I’m eyeball deep in this clinical decision support business because that’s where a lot of time and money is spent and considerable potential sits. I met our guest, Dr. David Edwards, through RTI, that’s Research Triangle International, a not-for-profit research organization. David and I both participate in a chronic pain…