I have had life long headaches that I have given up on fixing. Occasionally when I switch to a new doctor I will mention it just to see if they have anything new to say.

They usually just put me on a concoction of various pain killers (e.g., migraine specific stuff like sumatriptan). These prescriptions actually work great. But so did OTC aleve/advil/tylenol too.

The problem was that I didn't really care for more effective pain killers. What I really want is to fix the root cause and stop having these headaches.

So yea, I can totally see why something like this would fail. If the solution is still qualitatively the same, a small percentage improvement is just micro-optimizations that most doctors and patients won't care much for.