Wayne Martin, LCSW, BCIAC
Baylor All Saints Hospital
1400 Eighth Ave., Suite C6
Fort Worth, TX 76104
817-922-2060
Transcript: Wayne’s misdiagnosis
What was my experience with trigeminal neuralgia pain? I had pain ultimately for about seven months. It began in my jaw, here. It felt to me like I had a problem with a tooth. I went to see my dentist and she performed all the appropriate diagnostic attempts to figure out what was going on and could find nothing.
So, the waves of pain built for me until I was experiencing ten out of ten pain for twenty to thirty minutes. It was truly overwhelming for me and I’m someone who professionally helps people to manage chronic pain.
After a number of visits to doctors, I was diagnosed with atypical facial pain and then started on a regimen of Neurontin and we kept having to up the dose as I attempted to get relief from the pain and ultimately ended up taking a very large dose which barely managed the pain for me. The downside to that was all the negative cognitive effects that I had. I had poor memory and my cognitive processing was really slowed down. My wife and kids felt like I was a shell of my former self.
And then I had an experience with hypnosis that completely changed the story. Out of a hypnosis practice with a colleague, I experienced complete relief for most of the pain. And then I began using self hypnosis actively to self-treat and got to the point where I felt no pain at all. In fact, I felt no pain even as I was doing other things that ordinarily would have provoked the pain such as eating or drinking a cold drink, touching the area. These no longer triggered the pain for me.
It was later discovered though that I actually did have an abscessed tooth and by the time it was discovered, I had no pain at all and yet more than 50% of my jaw had been eaten away by the infection so I was treated with anti-biotics and a root canal. And the problem has completely resolved. I’ve had no return of pain since then.