For those of you who haven’t experienced crippling back pain, it is more intense than you can understand.
One time, I had to be dragged across the house on a blanket by my aging father to get to the power lift chair because I fell down trying to get out of bed.
Another time, I had a flare-up and had to lay in the bed of my truck while a friend drove me home because I couldn’t bend my leg to get in the car.
I’ve shit myself rather than try to get up and go to the bathroom because of the pain.
And yes, the insurance company tried to deny the epidural I received that probably ended up saving me from eventual suicide.
That one injection in my spine has kept the sciatica from affecting my legs and within 24 hours my life had changed.
And it took an extra 4 months because the insurance company at first denied it, then approved it, but only for a 2-day window so I couldn’t schedule the procedure, and I ended up having to go to the Board of Insurance twice.
4 months where I’d get flare-ups that made putting on pants an hour-long process. 4 months where I couldn’t visit friends because I didn’t want to risk getting stranded at their house unable to walk. 4 months where I could barely work because sitting at the computer was nearly impossible.
I hate violence, but if I’d have met one of the insurance company heads during those 4 months, I might have shot them.
As someone with crippling migraines, I am never ever questioning how debilitating someone else’s pain is.
I used to get those too when I was younger. I don’t envy you a bit there. I haven’t had one in over 20 years and the memory of them still frightens me.
I’ve had exactly one migraine and at every spike of it I remembered those stories of people who shoot themselves because of pain and was sad in the moment (but happy after) that I didn’t have a gun cuz I’d have absolutely used it
I get migraines - not as bad now, post menopause and on low dose daily HRT that seems to prevent most of them.
But absolutely the worst pain I’ve ever felt is migraine, and I’ve had unmedicated childbirth, broken bones, plenty of injuries, IUDs put in, nothing has even approached the pain level of a migraine. I used to not understand when the doctor would ask how bad it hurt on scale of 1-10 because it exists outside that scale.
Back pain I think is similar, but probably its own sort of hell because it immobilizes people.
That part about the pain scale is spot on. HRT and adequate anxiety and pain medication have made mine less common and intense too. I don’t know how or why though.
Imho the weirdest thing about migraines is when you’re 4 to 5 hours deep and suddenly your brain goes out in a bang. The pain subsides for a bit and you feel that weird euphoric feeling.
The third pain that can compare to that according to what I’ve heard is tooth ache. Although I’m blessed enough to never have had any issues in that department.
I’ve experienced migraines of all severity levels since I was a teenager. I have a top 5 list of the worst migraines I’ve ever experienced. Number 3 was the one where my husband found me sitting at the kitchen table with a spoon in my hand completely out of it. When he asked me what I was doing I told him I was considering gouging my eye out. Number 2 was the three days I lost to absence seizures. I actually called out of work twice within a few hours because my autopilot is strong and my brain was gone. I almost lost my job for that one. Number one was the time literally crawled through the house on my belly for the phone and gave up in the living room before passing out. All I can remember of that one was laying there feeling my heart beat in my fucking eyelashes for what felt like ages. That was the one that made me go see a neurologist. I would never ever not believe someone’s pain experience.
Whenever I read about the US healthcare system I wonder why it’s CEOs are not gunned down every single day.
Well either federal government cancel their job with single player of some form or they will will keep getting gunned down. They literally radicalizing people every day and some of these people are smart and capable.
Boardrooms, not classrooms.
I hurt my back doing construction. The company I sacrificed my back to wouldn’t cover the cost of my physical therapy. The pain has got me in trouble at other jobs too. I was in the lab and bent over to pick up something that fell on the ground only for my back pain to flare up again. The pain was so intense it took everything I had just to stand up again and then I could barely move. My coworkers and supervisor were very annoyed that I could barely move when there were criticals that I was working on.
You know what has radicalized me the most? Getting a fucking math degree and understanding precicely how evil capitalism at large, but insurance companies in particular, is. To see the falsehoods they peddle because the consumers of their propaganda do not know what is being said. To see how they skirt and cheat every guard rail put in place to make sure that there is some level of ethics using statistics and a bit of other math bullshit. It is disgusting, egregious, and downright infuriating.
Same for me. Getting a law degree.
Read tens of thousands of pages. Hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of cases, law review articles.
Story after story of police and corporate America fucking poor people.
In 2024 there are still companies arguing that asbestos is safe. Anything less than chattel slavery with strict runaway slave laws is insufficient for these psychos.
That’s a really interesting perspective. Was that material you sought for personal reasons or a required part of your education? Any specialization involved, if the latter? (I’m pretty ignorant about y’all’s schooling)
Good question. I’ve wondered how people could go to the same schools as I, sit through the same classes, and have wildly different political views. But it’s that they come into it with a different lens.
Example, There’s a Supreme Court case about a woman who was charged with obscenity for possession of porn. It didn’t belong to her. It was her boyfriends, maybe husband. Police came in with a warrant for his arrest, but he wasn’t there, and they wanted to squeeze her for information on his whereabouts, so they charged her with possession of porn he had squirreled away in the basement.
You’re could read that and be like “good, the police had a warrant and she should have cooperated, she had her turn in court and was convicted of possessing it, and we might disagree now but that was just the law of the day.”
Other students who were less ignorant, more fun to be around, and usually much better students and people read that and be like “could you believe these obvious racists jammed up this innocent woman over a porn mag just to serve a warrant?”
Speaking for myself, I could see that they were out there right now pulling the same type of shit and I thought now they’re going to have to go through me, once I get my card, let’s fight about it.
Then you start practicing and the lines start to blur a bit, things become grey, and you start to drink your own Kool Aid, whatever that may be. If you go defend corporations, you’re going to start thinking maybe they should have more rights, maybe they aren’t getting a fair shake by all these whiny plaintiffs and their surviving family members. You go prosecute criminals, you’ll think there is danger everywhere, suspicious of everyone.
I found a happy mix of picking and choosing cases of all kinds, now, but spent my formative years representing employees who got hurt at work. My Kool Aid was like “employees are being fucking by corporations, watch them or they’ll fuck you too, and insurance companies are evil, life sucking leaches.” So, my Kool Aid has no artificial flavor, right?
I did do a lot of extra reading as I was eic of the law review and a top student, able to remember obscure footnotes in great detail; reading stories and then drawing on them to remember rules and policy reasoning is very natural for my memory. Worked out well.
I have this eerie feeling that any large amount of legal documents is going to contain mostly stories of those with means fucking the rest of us.
I’ve worked in healthcare for over 20 years, and the fact is that licensed, well trained, and caring individuals are forced to waste hours a day getting ‘approval’ from non-licensed high school educated insurance reps to try and justify their treatments. There can be entire departments dedicated to just dealing with insurance companies at pretty much every hospital, but often times insurance companies will only talk with the actual clinicians that care for patients.
The entire practice is fucked. First of all non-licensed non-medical people should not be dictating the treatment of care. Whether it’s directly or by means of denying coverage. Second of all there should be absolutely no way that they should even be allowed to look at your private medical records. And finally when it comes to something like auto insurance there are laws that insurance companies cannot steer customers to certain repair shops or dealerships. And yet when it comes to our health, health insurance companies are able to set up elaborate networks that essentially do the exact same thing they steer customers to certain institutions and prohibit them from going to others.
The entire setup of our health care industry seems like it would be at odds with most of our well-established laws regarding insurance, PHI Access, and delivery of medical care.
This is going to become more and more of a problem since the working conditions are burning out clinicians at alarming rates
I commiserate with my medical professionals literally every time I have to see them. The worst part is that it isn’t even the GED holder on the other end of the request. It is the actuarial table and risk analysis software they punch everything in to. Or an AI trained on the exact same tables and algorithms.
I have contemplated training an AI to look at medical records and score the standard of care given to patients. Would be nice to be able to weaponize the tech against them.
I’ll give you a couple of caveats. (1) There is such a thing as Mutual Insurance, where the company is owned by its policy holders. Assuming they don’t have massive overheads, there is at least an ethical version of insurance that does exist. And (2) C’mon USA, get your fucking act together and do government health insurance. (signed, Canada)
Canada
If we’re not careful we’re gonna a vote in a scumbag next election whose people want to do away with healthcare access and put it back on “my death panel is my credit limit”.
Yes. It is always a battle. Unfortunately the pendulum will likely swing right next election, but hopefully we can limit the damage. Everyone is tired of Trudeau – combined with a lack of a counterpunching charismatic leader anywhere else means a lot of Canadians will hold their nose and vote PP. Fuck them all. But it’s going to happen, sadly.
The Canadian Future Party doesn’t have a hope in hell, but they at least have a promising platform. First past the post is bleh.
We have some insurance vendors that are mutual, but when it comes to health, vision, and dental you don’t get much of a choice (unless you want to spend even more money and go with a different plan than your work supplies assuming that it’s part of your benefits package in the first place).
I speak as a member of the country that indeed needs to get our shit together (like come on, every other country has this figured out).
Remember, convicted felons can be president!
fyi - Mangione posted in July 2023 that the chronic pain he’d had for years had been eliminated by spinal fusion surgery, which he recommended highly. He said he was finally able to sit and do other things that had been very painful, and had not taken pain meds for days. Of course maybe the pain, which he had posted about frequently for years, came back and he didn’t think to mention it. The one and only time he mentioned insurance in all his tweets was to say Blue Cross had covered his tests for Irritable Bowel Syndrome a couple years ago.
I know after surgeries I’ve been elated at the seeming reduction in pain, and all I do is rave about how great it is, but then it always comes back and I’m depressed and I just stop talking about it. wouldn’t shock me if that was his case.
What is this picture of? I’m not sure I get it.
This was an attempted correction for a L5-S1 Spondy. Basically the 5th lumbar vertebra slips anterior (forward) over the sacrum. This stretches the spinal cord, causing pain. The correction was attempted by using posterior fixation pedicle screws and rods to pull the 5th lumbar vertebra posterior (backwards) relative to the sacrum.
Based on this image, it’s hard to say - but very possible that this expensive procedure did not improve the pain the patient was experiencing. The spondy is still clearly present.
The vertebrae needn’t come back to its place but still give pain relief in the long term by giving it stability. It is usually accompanied by other procedures which also reduces strain on the nerve giving relief.
BTW I am a surgeon treating and operating for back pain.
can you tell if this image off-angle or are the pins not parallel?
looks excruciatingly painful
