A Vaccine to Prevent Shingles Pain - that you Probably

A Vaccine to Prevent Shingles Pain - that you Probably will never Get

My mother has always been a hardy woman; she never complained about anything, and she took pride in it. So when she developed a curious-looking set of blisters over her chest, she just thought it was some kind of infection and let it be. It took a few weeks to dry up, and she barely noticed it. To her, it was just a complicated-sounding name, and she forgot about it. What happened later though, in the aftermath, were things even she couldn't ignore in her toughened resilience. About a year afterwards, came the pain. This was the woman who had had three babies with no painkillers. The shingles pain was unbearable; it was relentless, and she felt she was going insane from the pain.

The shingles pain you feel after an attack of it disappears, is called postherpetic neuralgia. It comes about because the chickenpox viruses that remain in your system from an attack you might have had as a child, are suddenly reactivated. When you get older, your system gets weaker, and viruses suddenly decide to try their luck a second time. About one million people in America get it every year - that's about a third of everyone who's ever had chickenpox.

At first I was unhappy with my mother - she hadn't said anything to me. Surely, I felt, that for shingles pain this bad, there could be a cure of some kind. But when I took my mother to experts one after the other and also researched the Internet, I found out that there really was no real treatment, containment plan or care for this. Whatever treatment there was, brought on incidental effects were pretty bad on their own.

Now America invests about a half billion dollars every year on trying to find some kind of cure for this. Andfor the last four years, there's been a vaccine for shingles. The FDA says that if you get the vaccine, you bring down your risk of getting the disease by half; and the shingles pain you get afterwards, you reduce your chances of getting by two-thirds. At the time it seemed like a wonderful idea. It was simple, and it did the job. Well, why is it then that 90% of everyone who should receive it doesn't?

To begin with, this vaccine that helps you with the worst imaginable pain possible - shingles pain, is too expensive. It costs 10 times what any other vaccine costs, at about $200 a shot. And most insurance doesn't cover this. And people don't like to pay this much money for what seems to be just an injection. If it were a proper procedure that took some time, they might be more willing. And insurance companies that do give you something for this, ask you to spend out hand first, and they will reimburse you much later. And the reimbursement process isn't simple like with a flu shot either.

Some doctors and patients do absorb the enormity of what shingles pain can be like. And they try to get the vaccines in other less expensive wayslike brownbagging. The doctor writes out a prescription so that the patient can go to the pharmacy and pick up a vial, and bring it back to the doctor for the shot. This does make it cheaper. But bringing the vaccine from the pharmacy to the doctor's clinic can take a half hour; and every minute that the vaccine is not frozen, it loses power.

There you go - a great invention - medicine of the best kind that can prevent mind-boggling suffering and pain - failing to make it past the bureaucracy.