The Jesus Shot

http://www.governing.com/topics/health-human-services/tns-texas-sid-miller-jesus-shot.html

(3/21/2016) Texas Ag Commissioner May Have Billed Taxpayers for Trip to Get ‘Jesus Shot’

Miller, a former rodeo cowboy who suffers from chronic pain, told the Houston Chronicle earlier this year he has received the “Jesus Shot,” a controversial but legal medication administered only by a single Oklahoma City-area doctor who claims that it takes away all pain for life…

The “Jesus Shot” costs about $300 and includes Dexamethasone, Kenalog and B12, which have each been approved to treat inflammation…

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/03/18/oklahoma-doctor-claims-300-jesus-shot-can-cure-chronic-pain.html

Dr. Vania Apkarian, a physiology, anesthesiology, and physical medicine and rehabilitation professor at Northwestern University, called those claims “outrageous.”

“This is some variant of giving some anti-inflammatory drug and cortisol, which is what all chronic pain patients are treated with regularly in almost all pain clinics,” Apkarian, who has studied pain in animals and human models for two decades, told FoxNews.com. “It’s effective for a week or so, and eventually the pain comes back.”

He said the success rate of anti-inflammatory drugs like these is 10 to 20 percent at best.

“This is quackery,” Apkarian said. “There is nothing in here that is anything different from the standard lines of managing pain.”

He said the shot probably wouldn’t cause harm but rather, “It’s guaranteed not to do anything.”

Maybe I’m just overly tired, but what I see here is a pain management doctor calling his own practice “quackery” and “guaranteed not to do anything.”