How does primary care and pain management improve?

#DrMikeSays #Pain #ChronicPain

With so many forces marginalizing the patients that need care the most. How can lasting improvement to the landscape be achieved. As pithy as it sounds, "one conversation at a time." Dr Mike's biggest passion is the belief is that as long as patients and providers are willing to sit down and talk about the patient's real problems with an open agenda of improving the quality of both their mutual relationship and the patient's health, then real changes to the landscape will happen regardless of everything that is stacked against us.

It takes moral courage to stand up and say - these patients are being treated poorly by everyone else, so come here and lets try to start over. The most important attitude to have during this time is "I care more about where we are headed then where we have been."

Lots of patients have lots of labels all over their healthcare charts that have nothing to do with them. So much pettiness occurs in between the lines of a clinical note that my main advice to all providers is this: You take the patient's words with a grain of salt (which can be very reasonable), you REALLY need to do the same thing with other provider's comments. Sometimes the note you are reading, instead of revealing an accurate clinical picture of the patient and the patient's attitude, really reveals " this patient and I did not get along." This disagreement is NOT always the patients fault.

I get a lot of useful information from other provider's clinic notes, but the one information I try very hard to NEVER get from the note is how I should feel about the patient.

Providers, you are perfectly capable of forming your own opinion about the patient, so do THEM a favor and give them a REAL opportunity to have this next conversation, the one with you, to go in a much better direction. Sometimes the ONE thing a gaslit, medical trauma victim needs to change the entire trajectory of their care/life, is one provider who will listen with a NEW ear.

I pray you will let that be you today.