Great article!!!

I was wondering... if anyone knows what this kind of treatment costs?? Ball park figure???

Thanks,
Abbie

Just want to clear something up I wrote yesterday about the SCS. I haven't had problems with it...in fact it has been my life saver. However with that said if I would have gone with the ECT route I might not have the SCS today or the need for medication.

Mike...I will print your article and take it with me to my pain management Dr. who I will be seeing on the 10th of this month. I will also take down the 3 articles you mentioned. I'm sure he has access to all of them and he has a staff who can pull anything he needs. I will also print out a copy for the Doctor I worked with who still performs ECT...I'm sure he will enjoy it.

As far as cost goes I would think it would still be out of pocket and expensive.
Hugs, Jewells

Abbie and Jewells -

I am told that the approximate cost per session is anywhere between $1,000.00 and $1,200.00, and those figures may be a couple of years old. Multiplied by - say - 8 sessions, an you're in the range of $9,600.00, $14,400.00 if you go for all 12.

So the issue of pursuading the insurance companies to pick this up is of some obvious importance.

Mike

Kudos on the article. It is superb.

It's very interesting as well. One of the many docs I've seen (and the oldest) suggested that much chronic pain is thalamic in nature. ...or at least this was the common wisdom many years ago.

Thanks for the research Mike- Looks like we need some guinea pigs and some money!

Deb

Thank you so much for this. I've been away for awhile & am so glad I didn't miss this post. I don't think you give your short term memory enough credit. If it was really bad you wouldn't have been able to do this research or article. Mine is so bad, I have a hard time just reading through your post.

This sounds so exciting. If it can get rid of the pain, it's worth the $.

Thanks again,
Linmarie

Dear Linmarie -

Worth the wait may be more like it. I have an appointment with an ECT specialist next month, who originally wasn't that interested in seeing me, but becacame intrigued and invited me in to see him. He did so however with a warning, that, at least in California, ECT is used in purely a psychiatric context and by law you have to get three doctors to sign off before it can go forward, so he wasn't terribly optomistic.

As things stand, I may have a better chance of getting into a controlled study that's more than a year away at a local medical school. I would wish you better luck in your jurisdiction, but I see you're in CA as well. Anyhow, I'll report back if I get good news.

Mike

ps On the short-term memory issue. In working on the article, I found that while my ability to understand technical materials remained relatively intact, my “expressive” functions deteriorated to the point that I could work almost for a full day and then have only a paragraph to show for it. And then, after I had “completed" a section of the article, I reviewed ten pages of it in double-spaced type, only to see the it was incomprehensible, with thoughts at once scattered and repeated throughout, in no apparent order. Finally, I would up printing the pages out and taping them in order to my dining room table, where I could see it as a complete visual whole. I then spent three full days deciding where each and every paragraph, sentence and phrase belonged, until it assumed some level of cogency.

Further frustrating my effort was my inability to compose at all from memory: I was like a child in 6th grade continually referring to his notes as each paragraph was laboriously strung together, one by one. Even now, six weeks after the work was submitted, as I review the finished piece, I am continuously surprised with almost every paragraph, as though meeting a long forgotten friend.

If it's done on an outpatient basis (and no reason it can't be), then the cost is in the range of $1500 per treatment. Of course that's only if you don't have insurance. Otherwise they'll pay for it.