Chronic pain affects whole life
In a joint venture with Pain Management Group, Grand Lake Health System’s New Day Pain Management Center has been serving patients with chronic pain issues since 2014. New Day Pain Management Center Clinical Coordinator Tracy Smith informed St. Marys Rotarians on Wednesday of services the center offers to patients as a first resort for those suffering from chronic pain before they choose to go the surgical route.
Smith said chronic pain, such as back pain, has a serious impact on adults as she stated that adults with lower back pain are four times more likely to experience serious psychological distress compared to those who have no back pain.
“And as we are learning with chronic pain, it is like with any other chronic health issues, it affects your life, your well being, your psychosocial ability to work and affects how you perform your activities of daily living,” she added.
The four common types of pain the center sees are low and mid-back pain, neck pain, migraines and facial pain. Other chronic ailments the center sees include nerve damage, muscle spasm pain and shingles pain.
“We see a lot of work-related injuries as well as other ongoing issues,” Smith said. “We also see a lot of arthritis and shoulder pain and complex regional pain is another aspect of patients that we cure.”
To give patients the best care to combat chronic pain, Smith said the center works together with other adjunct providers to coordinate the care of a balanced approach.
“You have a lot of different areas that work on pain — physical therapy, chiropractors, massage and you might go to your family doctor,” she said. “So we try to incorporate a hos
pital-based pain clinic or center to coordinate all those adjuncts to help with the pain.”
The center has two providers in Dr. John Buonocore as the center’s physician and nurse practitioner Stacia Springer. Springer helps manage patients as well as follow up after procedures and manage medications.
The importance of having a hospital focus on pain management instead of letting patients go from provider to provider is that primary care physicians see a lot of patients who are trying to manage chronic pain, Smith said. Instead of going through multiple providers to get to the source of that pain a patient is dealing with, Smith said many times patients will try to band-aid the pain.
“And that gets frustrating for those primary care providers,” Smith added.
The center, Smith added, can help patients with their medications and keep people from having to go to the emergency
room — which can be cost-saving for patients — but she also stressed the need to see other adjunct therapies such as a physical therapist or chiropractors.
“We have a lot of patients that see us and they never went to physical therapy or did anything like that,” Smith said. “Then they go there after eight weeks, they are even surprised that it’s helped. Physical therapy can do a lot of other things — stretching, teaching you ergonomic movement and they have some therapeutic processes that they can do.”
Smith described the center as the first step for patients who are dealing with chronic pain before going to the surgical route.
As a first step to remedying or managing chronic pain, the center will offer physical and massage therapy through its adjunct therapy providers as well as interventional procedures, which include epidural steroid injection, facet joint injection, selective nerve root block and radiofrequency ablation (RFA).
Epidural injections
happen along the spine to settle down inflammation and facet injections are the center’s most common procedures. Smith explained that the spine has small joints on the outside of the vertebrae with small nerves that come out through that joint. As people age or through repetitive movement, the bones rub against each other and agitate the nerves.
RFA, Smith explained, is more of a long-term procedure as the physician will burn the nerves to provide pain relief for a patient anywhere from nine to 18 months.
The center will also offer medications and cognitive and behavioral therapy. She added that opioids are not the center’s first line of treatment for patients.
“It’s a tool in the toolbox but it is not the first line,” she said. “But it is not something that we don’t do either. In regards to prescribing opioid impulse control like that, we have accountability that we put on the patients as well as our staff.”
Smith said the center screens its patients for
opioid risk and patients sign a pain treatment agreement that states that if the center gives a patient opioids or other dangerous medications, a patient will only be getting those medications from the center filled at one pharmacy.
The center also administers random drug screenings to hold patients accountable. The center does not prescribe medical marijuana and CBD oil to patients.
“It keeps the community safe, it keeps the patient safe and it keeps our providers safe,” Smith said.
Smith said the center receives patients from as far as Sidney, Greenville and Lima areas as well as many patients from Mercer County.
The New Day Pain Management Center is open from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Patients do not need a physician’s referral and can call 419-394-9520 to set up a consultation.
New patient paperwork is located on the center’s website, GrandLakeHealth.org/Services/New-Day-Pain-Management-Center.html.