Page updated 9/22/10
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Lymphland International Lymphedema Online
| If you're on Medicaid, usually to get Lympedema therapy, you'll need a referral from your PCP, Primary Care Physician or whomever you see regularly. Make sure the dr writes URGENT on the referral or it can take up to 10 days for approval. An URGENT message will get it processed in 72 hours. I have Medi/Medi, Medicare & Medi-Cal, which is California's version of Medicaid. They require a referral for every little thing I want to do away from my regular dr. You'll need to be referred to a Lymphedema therapist who will do an initial evaluation. At that evaluation, you'll talk to him/her, be measured, discuss therapy, skin care & more. Getting gastric bypass will help with your weight. As someone else already said, you'll still have Lymphedema. There is NO cure for it, just management & therapy. Everyone responds to the therapy, some better than others. In an ideal fantasy world, insurance would pay for continued therapy to get the desired results, without long breaks or having to be discharged & start all over. In reality, most of our insurances pay for a certain amount of therapy appointments & then want to quit paying due to high costs, limits, lack of progress, etc, whatever reasons they want to use to quit paying. On limits to therapy: Medicare has an "exception" process whereby if your physician, after reviewing your treatment plan and your progress against that plan, determines that you will need additional treatments in order to reach the planned goal, and if there are co-conditions (e.g. obesity, multiple limbs, congestive heart failure, peripheral artery disease, etc) which make progress slower than normal, an exception can be obtained to the annual therapy limits and additional sessions can be obtained. |