What's Involved With a Pain Management Evaluation?

One in five Americans struggles with chronic pain — a number that’s expected to rise thanks to an aging population. If you’re among the more than 50 million adults in the United States whose lives are impacted by relentless pain, relief is your top priority. And it’s also our top priority.

To get on the road to relief, your first step is a pain management evaluation with our team here at Comprehensive Pain Management. Under the direction of Dr. Boris Shwartzman and Dr. Do Chan, we bring the experience you need to identify and remedy your chronic pain.

The goal of pain management

While the goal of pain management may seem obvious — to manage your pain — we believe that to do so, we need to fully evaluate your health in order to find the best possible treatment avenue for restoring your quality of life.

Pain can be incredibly complex, and the answers aren’t always cut and dried. For example, in a best case scenario, we identify the exact cause of your pain and work toward resolving that issue to provide you with long-term relief.

Unfortunately, this scenario isn’t always the case. At our practice, we help patients with degenerative conditions (think arthritis), as well as neurological diseases like complex regional pain syndrome, which are harder to treat since there are no cures.

In these cases, we take a more integrative approach to your pain, which includes pain management alongside other effective treatments, such as physical therapy or massage therapy.

Your evaluation

If you’re struggling with ongoing pain, we start with a full evaluation. During this visit, we sit down with you to review your symptoms and your medical history.

We then turn to advanced diagnostic tools for further investigation, including:

X-rays
CAT scans
MRIs
Blood work
Nerve and muscle studies
Neurological tests

Once we have a better idea of what’s causing your pain, we tailor a treatment plan to fit your unique needs and goals. We prefer to start out conservatively at first to see how your pain responds and to avoid more invasive interventional techniques.

If your pain doesn’t respond to these conservative treatments, which may include physical therapy and medications, we can become more aggressive.

To give you an idea about what we’re talking about, here’s a list of some of our more common pain-management strategies:

These procedures are incredibly successful in helping our patients finally lead a life that’s free from pain.

If you want to say goodbye to chronic pain, contact one of our offices in Attleboro or Franklin, Massachusetts, or South Kingstown or Warwick, Rhode Island, to set up your pain management evaluation.