Wasting time and money

• Mar 16, 2018 • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

Classic marketing quote, continuing a line of thinking I started a few days ago (Regressing to Hell):

“I know that I waste half the money I spend on advertising. The problem is, I don’t know which half.”

We can easily revise that for treatments and therapy for chronic pain:

“I know that I waste half the time and money I spend on therapy. The problem is, I don’t know which half.”

Or maybe ⅔? ¾? ⅓? People will draw the line in different places—and where and why would reveal some vested interests—but I think everyone agrees that progress in chronic pain recovery is often extremely erratic, and some time and money always gets wasted.

Which is why, very generally (693!), it is valuable for patients to be educated and empowered, to improve the odds of avoiding the most useless treatment options.