There are a lot of amazing doctors out there who genuinely want to put an end to the pain their patients experience. This may be hard to believe for a lot of people with chronic pain because so many of us have had terrible experiences where doctors belittled our problems, disrespected us, and failed to treat us properly. I have had bad experiences with doctors, but that doesn’t change the good experiences that I have had with other doctors.

I want to share an experience that I had with one of the several doctors that I had interacted with during my chronic pain journey. This took place during the lockdowns of 2020. I was currently receiving a nerve stimulation treatment through Kaiser in Northern California. Kaiser cancelled my nerve treatment due to the increasing number of Covid cases throughout the area. This was incredibly difficult for me because I was convinced that this nerve treatment was going to cure my pain (spoiler alert: it did not). 

I called up Kaiser every day, begging them to restart my treatment and every time I was told that I just had to be patient and wait. It’s hard to be patient when you’re in constant pain. I started searching for other organizations in the area that offered this particular nerve treatment. That’s when I discovered that UC Davis offered the treatment. This was an hour drive for me and it meant paying out-of-pocket to receive the treatment, but I was willing to do anything to get out of pain. 

At my first appointment, I met with a UC Davis doctor that specialized in these types of treatments. We talked for a while about the treatment process and what I had been through with chronic pain. She was friendly and a really good listener. I asked her if she had any advice for me on how to stop being in pain. She said, “Maybe” and then left the room. A few minutes later she came back with some paperwork in her hand. It was a print out from PubMed.gov with a study on a new therapy that was being used to treat some chronic pain conditions. She started to explain the study to me and highlighted the information that was most relevant to me. I remember feeling like this was the first time a doctor actually cared about helping me out of pain.

This doctor talked to me as if there was hope that I would someday be pain free. She talked to me as if I was intelligent and capable of understanding research. It made me so happy to see a doctor take the time to go and look for an answer to my question. To me it was her way of saying, “I don’t have all the answers, but the answers are out there if you look for them”.

No other doctor had ever taken the time to do something like this for me before. Normally in my appointments, they would lay out two or three treatment options, and if those didn’t work, they would treat me like a hopeless cause. I did not receive the treatment this doctor had found a study on because my Kaiser doctor disagreed with it. But I always valued this interaction and I wished that my other doctors had treated me the same way. 

Now as an ER nurse, I try to do the same for my patients. Whenever a patient has a condition that they are having trouble treating, I will look up the newest research on the condition to see what treatments are available. I love printing out research and education for my patients because I firmly believe that they have a right to know what treatment options are available to them.