Pain Management

If you require a lot of pain medication or you have pain that interferes with your daily activities, your symptoms may be reducing the quality of your life and affecting your overall health. Our pain management program offers treatments to make you more comfortable and allow you to be more active while eliminating or reducing the need for addictive painkillers.

First, we’ll ask you for a complete medical history. Then, we’ll talk about your symptoms and perform the tests or procedures necessary to diagnose the cause of your pain. After we understand why you’re hurting, we’ll set up a treatment plan that addresses your symptoms. Sometimes, as with an inflamed nerve, degenerated joints, or inflamed disc, we can recommend a procedure to treat the source of your pain.

We have experience in diagnosing and treating a wide range of conditions. After we discuss your symptoms and history, we will perform tests and procedures to find the root of your pain. Often, if we think there is more than one source, we may perform a diagnostic procedure, such as a nerve block, to narrow down the cause. If we cannot pinpoint the source of the pain, we will still treat the symptoms to our full ability.

Our goal is to reduce pain and improve function and mobility. However, it is important to have realistic expectations. In some cases, the pain goes away and our goal switches to preventing it from coming back (through physical therapy and rehabilitation, core strengthening, nutrition, weight loss, etc). In most cases, we are able to at least make a difference. In all cases, we are dedicated to trying our best to improve your quality of life.

Sometimes the procedures we perform fail to help as much as we want them to. In these cases, we may repeat the injection, try a different kind of procedure, or add different modalities. Pain, especially when associated with aging and degeneration, can be chronic.

When activity in an injured part of the body causes inflammation, it results in pain. Techniques like physical therapy or exercise to relieve the pain can cause more inflammation and, thus, more pain. This negative feedback cycle leads to chronic pain. A herniated disc compressing a nerve root, for example, may react to any kind of physical activity with more inflammation, and that causes more disability. The secondary buildup of inflammation makes the pain worse, and the process continues. Many of our treatments can break this cycle and enable you to benefit from physical therapy and exercise.

We are careful and judicious when it comes to prescribing opiate medications, as we believe that opiates are ineffective for long term treatment of chronic pain. While they can sometimes be effective for the short-term treatment of acute pain, they may also have side effects, including the risk of dependency or addiction. Read more about our opiate policy here.

Steroids, specific kinds of hormones that occur naturally in the body, are one of the most powerful anti-inflammatory substances available. Steroid injections can produce a strong, quick anti-inflammatory response in a localized area, interrupting the cycle of pain and inflammation and preventing tissue damage. Most people can tolerate the careful use of short courses of steroids, but we always consider the benefits versus the risks.