Joanna Kempner and Clusterbusters featured in Washington Post article

Joanna Kempner was featured in an article in the Washington Post about independent researchers experimenting with treatments for cluster headaches.

Clusterbusters’ out-of-the-box efforts on behalf of its pain-wracked members are “the stuff of movies,” said Rutgers University sociologist Joanna Kempner, who is writing a book on the group. She compares the clusterheads to the 1980s HIV activists who also boldly experimented with unapproved drugs.

“Medicine has ignored these patients for so long that they live in a wild west of treatments,” Kempner said. “They saw the gap in research and did their own research on their own bodies.”

In the process, Clusterbusters has won the hearts — and help — of key allies in academia and the pharmaceutical industry.