What is chronic pain?

When you’re injured, pain signals naturally travel from your injury site to your spinal cord and brain. While the pain typically goes away on its own over time, in some cases, your pain signals can continue firing.

Chronic pain — any pain that lasts for 3-6 months or longer — often continues long after your injury has healed. The pain itself can be constant or intermittent. While chronic pain can happen anywhere in your body, the most common types of chronic pain include:

• Headaches and migraines
• Back pain
• Arthritis
• Postsurgical pain
• Fibromyalgia
• Multiple sclerosis
• Nerve pain
• Neck pain
• Knee pain

Without early intervention, chronic pain can cause depression and anxiety, leading many patients to become opioid-dependent.

How is chronic pain treated?

Dr. Said follows a comprehensive protocol before treating you. First, he performs a physical exam to assess your functional capacity, check for the presence of analgesia (the inability to feel pain), range of movement, and more.

Along with his team, Dr. Said also searches for signs of opioid dependence or addiction. As a pain management physician, his goal is to wean you off of opioids and other addictive medications so you can enjoy a pain-free life without dependence.

Some of the interventional pain treatments that Trinity Health Center offers include:

Facet joint injections

Dr. Said uses fluoroscopy, an X-ray producing real-time images, to guide the injection of an anesthetic into the facet joint. This procedure helps relieve chronic joint pain.

Trigger point injections

A trigger point injection helps relieve knots under the skin that form when your muscles can’t relax. Dr. Said injects an anesthetic directly into the trigger point to ease the pain.

Physical therapy

Physical therapy massages, exercises, stretches, and more can help reduce chronic pain and help you regain function in painful muscles and joints.

Behavioral management

Behavioral management techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) help improve physical and psychological function to ease chronic pain in cancer patients, those with chronic disabilities, and more.

Interventional therapeutic procedures

Dr. Said uses interventional therapeutic techniques to ease pain without resorting to invasive surgery. From nerve blocks and epidural steroid injections to spinal cord stimulation and peripheral nerve stimulation, these techniques can help you regain function and mobility.

Pharmacotherapy

Dr. Said incorporates pharmacotherapy — the use of medications to ease or eliminate pain — into many of his pain management plans. Rather than using addictive opioids, he strives to prescribe nonaddictive medications that target pain at its source.

With a state-of-the-art office equipped with the most advanced pain management technology available, Dr. Said can help you lead a pain-free life. To schedule a consultation, call Trinity Health Center.