HeyJoe,
This is a really great article and offers some genuine hope and encouragement for the future if more and more Drs become educated to the disease, chronic pain as it seems Drs Gordon and Kern have already.

Reminds me of a very fine movie some years ago, "The Doctor" starring Wiliam Hurt who typified the medical community as a brilliant and wonderfully skilled surgeon w/ absolutely no bedside manner or empathy for his patients. To make a long story short he contracted throat cancer, became a patient in his own hopsital and was subjected to the same nonesense, coldness, impersonal treaments, long waits, and aggravations that we have all dealt with routinely.

A dying young woman w/ a brain tumor finally got through to him to become a more empathetic physician. In the last scenes of the movie Hurt's residents were told to strip, don' patient gowns, were assigned particular diseases and maladies. A noteworthy comment was that the residents/patients were real people not "the gallbladder in 403" or the "MI in the ICU" and were subjected to the same treatments, tests, waits, etc that they would prescribe for their future patients. I think like Darlindeb25 noted that if more Drs experienced the pain and the tests as we do the standards of care would change dramatically.

Thanks for this post - hopefully more pain centers like Wasser will develop.
Alkymst