One of the hallmarks of a successful pain clinic is a willingness to develop individualized treatment plans for each patient. Individualizing treatment offers multiple benefits, not the least of which is the ability to look into a long list of treatments rather than sticking with just one or two.
How many treatments are there? Too many to really do justice to all of them in a single post. However, we can divide all the treatments into a number of categories for better understanding. As you read through these categories, keep in mind that KindlyMD is fully on board with the idea of individualized treatment.
Western medicine is heavily dependent on the concept of pharmacology. As such, we would expect drug therapies to be the primary category of pain treatment options. That they are. Drug therapies can take many forms:
Each type of medication targets pain in a different way. Pain management doctors work with their patients to figure out not only which type of medication to utilize, but how they expect it to offer relief.
Pain medicine has really begun to embrace injection therapies over the last few years. These treatments rely on targeted injections to help provide long-term relief from certain types of pain. Some of the injections make use of steroids and anesthetics. Others might utilize something similar to Botox. Injection therapies tend to be a good option for musculoskeletal pain, certain types of headaches, and even fibromyalgia.
The next category, surgical therapies, tends to set off alarm bells for a lot of chronic pain patients. The thing to understand is that not all the surgical procedures are considered major procedures. Spinal cord stimulation is a good example. It involves a minor surgical procedure that implants a small device underneath the skin.
Just about everything else not covered in the first three categories is considered an alternative therapy. Perhaps the most recognized of these alternatives is physical therapy. Believe it or not, physical therapy can go a long way toward alleviating some types of pain.
Here are some of the other therapies in this category:
There are more than a dozen other therapies in the alternative category. The most important thing to remember with every single pain management treatment is that results can vary.
The whole point of developing individualized treatment plans is to ultimately discover the therapy or therapies that work best for each patient. A good pain management doctor will never unequivocally say that one particular treatment is always best. That's not true of every patient.
An individualized treatment plan helps us figure out what is most likely to offer you maximum relief. Sometimes we hit on it quickly, other times we need to try a few things first. Nonetheless, the benefits of individualized treatment are undeniable. Pain medicine continues to prove it every day.
