Originally Posted by fmichael

My first thought is that something bizarre happened last year, when I would have sworn that my long-time doctor at USC, who gave me a non-working number to contact Stanford regarding their inpatient pain program and - after I checked the website for Standford's Pain Management Center and found nothing pertaining to any inpatient program - he later confirmed that Stanford's inpatient pain program had in fact shut down, but when I saw him this morning, he made clear that he never told me any such thing!?! In fact, its director is his good friend.

That said, I was hot to trot at the time, and I would encourage you to do so.

My guess is that 3 - 7 days is just long enough to take you off all of your meds, at which point they can not only observe you at your "best," but take subtle measurements of autonomic nerve functioning that could easily be obscured by thing like Neurontin, and then perhaps try a change up in your medications based upon their test results and observations. I'm unsure what they could do in 3 days, 7 seems more reasonable. And in keeping with what you were thinking, I KNOW (as well as I can) that the figure that was bandied about a year ago was 3 weeks, which may well be ideal and the way it used to be, but is probably not what insurance companies are willing to cover anymore.

Apologies again for the confusion.

Mike