Military Pain Management

Treating chronic pain is no easy task and our military patients deserve the personalized and comprehensive care that they need. While some pain centers in the country understand the unique needs of veterans and military, unfortunately most don’t and instead, they provide the same approach as they do to their civilian patients.

What we focus on at River City is first and foremost establishing an accurate diagnosis of the cause of the pain. This is obvious, as you cannot truly address the root of the problem if you don’t accurately name it first. This part of the process is not as easy as it sounds, as often times, there are a lot of “incidental findings”, such as degenerative disc disease in the spine, which may seem to explain the pain but in reality, it doesn’t. We cannot be tricked by quick explanations and need to evaluate the patient’s symptoms in a comprehensive way before coming to conclusions.

Once we find out the causes of the pain, which in most cases are multiple, our goal is to address each one of them in a targeted way. We always want to make sure that the patient is connected with appropriate resources at Ft Benning or the VA as treating military and veteran patients is always a team effort.

In addition to that, what we uniquely offer at River City are all the standard pain management treatment modalities (such as pain injections, etc.) but also regenerative treatments (stem cells, PRP, etc.), advanced pain procedures (spinal cord stimulators, minimally invasive fusion, etc.) and a new approach to understanding how pain works.

We base some of our philosophy on the work of Dr. Sarno (a fellow physical medicine and rehabilitation and pain management physician) and others, who described the powerful connection between emotional and physical pain. What he described as Tension Myoneural Syndrome (TMS) is a way that our central (brain and spinal cord) and peripheral (nerves connected to muscles/ joints) nervous systems interact and create the sensation of pain that is beyond a response to tissue injury.

As physical medicine and rehabilitation specialists, our goal is to rehabilitate and restore damaged and painful tissues when possible. This is where regenerative medicine options serve us as additional tools for the right patients. Stem cells and platelet rich plasma are some of the options that we can offer, to use our own body’s healing mechanisms to restore function and strength.