Urgent--does it matter what type of dr treats me for pain ?
 

Is your PCP willing and able to provide the pain control you need?
And any added paperwork & oversight...
That is the first thing to check on..before you make any changes..

Some states, areas are cracking down on RX meds/controlled meds, so PCP may not want to deal with that if it is - or becomes an issue..

Not an expert in the SSDI stuff, but I'm sure others have change drs over time for various reasons, so as long as all documentation and such is good..I don't think it would be a problem..
Drs retire, move , close a practice...and people need to find a new one..

To finish the story :) Kinda
 

pain
 

I go to the pain clinic and the dr there prescribes my pain meds but would perfer my pcp to oversee them... ssd DOESNT CARE WHO manges it atleast mine in Iowa

Sad, but true. The War on Drugs is now the war on people in pain. Some states have medical marijuana programs. Illinois does.

I wonder what Social Security would do if you moved to a state with a medical marijuana card and told them you were using it for pain management...

good question.

I don't think the SSA could do much about it but one thing is for sure, your part D, if you have it will not cover your medicinal mj costs. And that can get very expensive on a limited income.

Not totally sure what "very expensive" means?

MM oz. go for $200 -$350.....That last quite some time....You are correct its completely out of pocket costs...

The hardest part is finding what works for you!

Well, I think that Social Security would have a hard time arguing that you're not getting proper treatment for a condition if Medicare has been approving payment to a particular provider for treatment of that condition. As long as Medicare recognizes that your PCP is treating you for your condition in a way that they will pay for, I wouldn't worry too much about it when it comes time to provide your records for a CDR.


(Medicare is a government program, and it has limited resources, and has to make sure that taxpayer money isn't being spent on hooey.

So, as long as a treatment has been proven effective for a condition, Medicare will likely cover it. If it hasn't then, it won't.

Some examples of things that Medicare does not recognize would be if you're seeing an acupuncturist or taking homeopathic remedies, then Medicare will deny the claims and Social Security will probably reject that as an appropriate treatment. Chiropractic is covered in limited circumstances by Medicare for things like lower back pain, but Medicare does not recognize the claim that diseases of the body are caused by "vertebral subluxations", so they'll likely deny your claim if you say that you're disabled or getting treatment for that reason.

As to the debate about whether a MD or a DO is better, you can go to a MD or a DO as your PCP, as they both have valid medical degrees and licenses, but it's how they are treating you and what they are billing Medicare for that counts. Personally, I don't see an MD or a DO as being better than the other one, all else being equal, and I have seen both in the past.)

Make sure you are getting treatments that Medicare recognizes and pays for. Medicare is a part of Social Security and the two are tightly integrated. In fact, during a CDR, Social Security can access and consider your Medicare records to back up your claims for when you told Social Security you were getting treatment. Also, if you go more than 2 years without using your Medicare card at all, it will trigger a CDR no matter when your regularly scheduled one happened to be.

Yeah, but here's the thing. Marijuana laws vary widely by state. You could just live somewhere where it's legal for recreational use or where you could grow a few plants for yourself.

Illinois has a Medical Marijuana (MM) card, but the problems plaguing our system have mostly been (roughly in this order):

1. Doctors are worried about prescribing it to anyone because they could get into hot water with the DEA (federal government) for prescribing something that is legal in the state. The state fixed that problem. Now, when you apply for your card, the state just asks your doctor to verify that you have a condition on the list that the state approves MM for, so the doctor isn't prescribing you anything.

2. The program has a limited list of conditions. Even though MM could well be useful for other conditions, if it's not on the list, you can't get a card. The committee in charge of voting to add new conditions appears to be quite conservative, and so new conditions have had to be added by changing the law or by filing a lawsuit against the committee.

3. If you can get past the first two, you have to buy it from a state dispensary, and they have limited hours, are not allowed to help you find a doctor who will cooperate with the process, and they charge like 3 times as much as the street price. Since marijuana possession in Illinois is a civil infraction with a fine not to exceed $200 with automatic deletion of the record every 6 months, I could see some getting frustrated with the system and going another way.

4. It's a "pilot" program, so it has to be renewed every few years. If it doesn't, then it sunsets and the only way to keep your medicine would be to buy it elsewhere.

I've been struggling with the idea of going back to smoking it. When I was in the two year waiting period for Medicare, I used it to keep my bipolar disorder under control, and it helped an incredible amount with the depression and didn't seem to have any side effects. The antipsychotic meds that doctors push on you make it impossible to wake up in the morning, you start gaining weight and could become diabetic. They have to take blood all the time and make sure it isn't causing your organs to fail. I got my Medicare Part D statement from the insurance company last year and it said that I went through $16,000 of prescription drugs trying to keep a lid on this horrible disease.

By the time you add the labwork and everything else, that's almost $18,000 of taxpayer money spent every year just to keep me on meds. That's kind of a lot to avoid letting me use a plant that grows in the ground, but attitudes against it (which can pretty much all be traced back to the drug companies) mean that we'll probably be fighting this battle for years.

And it's sad, because with all this bluster about how Medicare is "going broke", they are legally barred from negotiating better drug prices *and* they take the very unfortunate prevailing attitude towards marijuana.

That is, treating people who smoke it as chiselers instead of acknowledging it as medicine. :P

So, as soon as I got my Medicare card, I started seeing a psychiatrist and taking the "official medicine", and I can tell you that it makes me worse in so many ways, but you literally cannot describe that to anyone. For example, one thing it did was cause me to gain 60 pounds. I was always about 160-170 pounds before this crap, and I'm currently hovering around 230. Yuck.