What To Expect From A Pain Management Clinic

Today in America, close to fifty million people from all of the age groups suffer from chronic pain day to day. For most of these people, living just one day without having difficulty moving across a room or performing simple tasks seems like a day dream. They may be using all of the medication prescribed to them by their doctor, taking it as easy as they can, and taking part in physical therapy on a week to week basis, but yet the pain still persists and seems to be growing stronger every day.

For these people, a viable option for help would be to turn to a pain management clinic.

What is a Pain Management Clinic?

> A pain management clinic, in its most general definition, is any health care facility that not only helps patients manage their chronic pain, but also helps diagnose what the specific source of the pain is. Most pain management clinics will accomplish this by offering a discipline program.

How can a Pain Management Clinic help you?

> Every pain management clinic may be different in some way, but they are all similar in that they have a team of health care providers who come from a variety of different medical specialties (therapists, psychologists, etc) and will develop a strategy with their patients for coping with the pain.

> The first and foremost thing that a pain management clinic can do is prescribe to you the correct medication. There are quite a few different kinds of medications that the clinic will be able to prescribe, as there are also quite a different reasons for why one could have chronic pain throughout their body.

• Pain relievers are only useful for relieving the most minor of pains, but they’re still usually the first medicine that a pain management clinic will prescribe.
• Anti-depressants were originally invented to combat depression, but their usefulness at combating chronic pain has also been explored and found to have great success. Something unique about anti-depressants is that they can help a person sleep, which is very difficult when one is suffering from pain and tossing and turning all night.
• Anti-inflammatory drugs include ibuprofens and naproxen’s, and as the same suggest, they are used to treat pain that results from inflammation. They are available over the counter, and will be prescribed to you by the clinic rather than be handed over to you in person by your doctor.
• Some would dispute whether injections would count as a form of medication, but pain management clinics do prescribe it to their patients. An example of an injection would be an anesthetic used to control swelling and muscle spasms.
• Morphine and other similar forms of medication may also be prescribed to you by a pain management clinic; morphine is only effective at relieving short term pain, which means that they won’t be the clinics first choice for helping relieve your chronic pain.