No, Pain medication is not the only option. In fact there’s usually about 4 different options that you can end up using. The first option is conservative therapies, which can incorporate chiropractic therapy, physical therapy, deep ultrasound, yoga, Pilates things like that. The second type is use of medications but when people typically talk about medications they think that the only option is narcotics but there’s other types of non-addictive, non-habit forming, non-opiate medications like anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxers and anti neuropathic medications.
Typically the quickest relief can come from interventional procedures and they can be given towards any area of the body for any type of pathology that can be contributing to the chronic pain and finally there are more invasive things like surgery. We look at the whole person because there are a lot of the things that sometimes can prevent someone from getting better. Those things could be poor muscle strength posture, for instance smoking, uncontrolled diabetes and things like that can lead to less than optimal outcomes in terms of pain management. So if somebody comes in we just don’t address the specific thing that may be causing the pain but other factors that may be contributing to the sensation of pain and the sensation of suffering as well.
I think the comprehensive approach comes from being trained at a large University like John’s Hopkins. At John’s Hopkins we incorporated psychological care, surgical care, medication management with pharmacists, social workers and things like that and we noticed that the best outcomes in every patient was when this whole comprehensive model was actually utilized as opposed to just individual units that are not talking to each other so that’s the name of the clinic is Nevada Comprehensive Pain Center because I wanted to bring a piece of John’s Hopkins model to Las Vegas.