I have had life long headaches that I have given up on fixing. Occasionally when I switch to a new doctor I will mention it just to see if they have anything new to say.
They usually just put me on a concoction of various pain killers (e.g., migraine specific stuff like sumatriptan). These prescriptions actually work great. But so did OTC aleve/advil/tylenol too.
The problem was that I didn't really care for more effective pain killers. What I really want is to fix the root cause and stop having these headaches.
So yea, I can totally see why something like this would fail. If the solution is still qualitatively the same, a small percentage improvement is just micro-optimizations that most doctors and patients won't care much for.
It seems like a flaw in the system though because those micro-optimizations are what usually drives the free market and accumulate to become huge. If all buying decisions were just made on the same coarse decision making then the useful competition-by-endless-small-improvements would be replaced with competition-by-insidious-marketing, which I guess is the state that pain medicine is in.
Pretty spot-on guess! I do have relatively high blood pressure, typically in the 130-150 range.
Doctors have suggested it before but since I am borderline I don't really need to be on meds yet. I think it sounds worse than needing to take pain killers occasionally.
I was borderline. Higher bp increases your risk of stroke. I figured the headaches were a warning.. I could be wrong about that though.. I take a very low dose ace inhibitor and it works great. Doc said it wasn't a permanent thing necessarily.. I could probably go off of it if I was more consistent with the DASH diet and exercise more and drop 15-20 pounds.
Keto diet supposedly helps drop the bp too but diets are really hard to maintain and stick with.
They usually just put me on a concoction of various pain killers (e.g., migraine specific stuff like sumatriptan). These prescriptions actually work great. But so did OTC aleve/advil/tylenol too.
The problem was that I didn't really care for more effective pain killers. What I really want is to fix the root cause and stop having these headaches.
So yea, I can totally see why something like this would fail. If the solution is still qualitatively the same, a small percentage improvement is just micro-optimizations that most doctors and patients won't care much for.