Dear Richard -

I'm not sure it's all that hopeless. In fact, one thing that this board has been good for over the years is that when people list a specific geographical area, sometimes (but not always) a wealth of good responses pop up. For some odd reason, many of the best practitioners are in the Northeast - there are specifically clusters around Boston and Philadelphia, to my knowledge - while there are a couple of very good docs in San Francisco, and a terrific guy at USC in Los Angeles. To say nothing of strong departments at the Cleveland Clinic and Johns Hopkins. I also understand that there's a good department at Vanderbilt in Nashville,* and I am sure that there are a number of others in university settings as well. That said, there is apparently a dearth of quality care in many regions of the country, the Pacific Northwest for one. (And sadly, the Mayo Clinic is nothing to write home about, unless you're fortunate enough to live in or near Rochester MN, where they have a real issue in treating "out of area" pain patients, in contrast, for instance, to Dr. Schwartzman who had no problem seeing me in Philadelphia when I flew in from L.A. for treatment.)

I don't know if you've done this, but it doesn't hurt to start a thread with, "Does anyone know any good doctors in the _______ area?" In fact, if you're very lucky, you just might find something using a variation of this last sentence as a template in the search engine on the site. Specifically, using the "advanced search" feature, try a search of thread titles only for "doctors" or "doctor" or "doc" along with name of your city/state/region. Unless you know it's been done without success, it's worth a shot in any event.

Good luck.

Mike

*I've spoken to someone who's quite happy with his care at Vanderbilt.