Chronic Pain Management

Chronic pain can often be highly disabling and limit quality of life. Victor Mendoza, MD, Umut Tufan, MD, and the rest of the Fountain of Youth Medical Spa team in Birmingham, Alabama, provide chronic pain management programs that help patients cope with long-term pain. Their extensive expertise in managing persistent pain offers reliable symptom reduction and increased mobility. Call Fountain of Youth Medical Spa to discover the benefits chronic pain management delivers, or request an appointment online today.

What is chronic pain?

Pain is a vital response to injuries and acute illnesses, warning you that something’s wrong. However, chronic pain persists long after it ceases to serve a useful function.

Acute pain declines as your injury heals or your body recovers from disease, eventually disappearing. With chronic pain, symptoms might continue for months or years, and in many cases, pain never goes away.

Chronic pain is disabling, affecting mobility and making work and everyday activities challenging or impossible. Living with chronic pain often affects mental health, too.

What conditions commonly cause chronic pain?

Persistent pain commonly develops because of nerve damage or dysfunction (peripheral neuropathy) caused by an injury or illness. Sometimes, chronic pain is idiopathic, meaning its cause is unclear. Chronic pain conditions Fountain of Youth Medical Spa treats include:

• Arthritis
• Recurring headaches and migraines
• Herniated discs
• Fibromyalgia
• Spinal stenosis
• Postsurgical pain
• Postherpetic neuralgia from shingles
• Diabetic peripheral neuropathy
• Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS)

Fountain of Youth Medical Spa can also treat chronic pain caused by long-term illnesses like cancer.

No test can measure pain precisely, so your provider relies on a symptom review, physical exam, and your medical history to determine possible causes. They may recommend diagnostic imaging, blood work, or other tests to confirm or rule out underlying conditions or injuries causing chronic pain.

What does chronic pain management involve?

Fountain of Youth Medical Spa’s team designs personalized treatment plans and offers chronic disease management programs for patients who would benefit. Treatments that might feature in your chronic pain management plan include:

• Pain medications
• Anti-inflammatories
• Nerve blocks
• Epidural steroid injections
• Viscosupplementation (hyaluronic acid joint injections)
• Laser treatments
• Physical therapy
• Cognitive-behavioral therapy
• Nutrition counseling 

Lifestyle changes like increasing your activity levels, changing your diet, and losing weight are important elements of chronic pain management.

For example, excess body weight strains your joints and organs, makes you prone to obstructive sleep apnea (which affects sleep quality), and increases your risk of additional health problems like Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Smoking affects blood flow, limits healing, and increases your risk of cancer significantly.

Patients whose pain doesn’t improve after they’ve tried all these treatments might benefit from spinal cord or peripheral nerve stimulation. Small implantable pulse generators interfere with pain signals traveling from your spine to your brain, changing pain sensations to pleasant tingling or removing them altogether.

To discover how you could benefit from chronic pain management, schedule an in-person or telehealth consultation online or call Fountain of Youth Medical Spa today.