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Give Yourself the Gift Of Life with Less Pain
With modern medicine's wide spectrum of pain management techniques, you can intervene before the pain hits and start living your life again. Interventional pain management uses specialized procedures to identify and treat pain, including nerve blocks, spinal cord stimulators, epidurals, physical therapy, and minimally invasive surgeries.
Getting Acquainted with Pain Intervention
When seeing chronic pain patients that cannot achieve adequate relief from normal treatments, interventional pain procedures can be a pathway to less daily pain. Though minimally invasive, these procedures are a last resort and are only considered if the patient fails to achieve relief from pain with medication, has tried at least 6 weeks of physical therapy, or both. Clinicians with additional fellowship-level training perform over 200 of these procedures routinely, with their intensity ranging from simple nerve blocks and spinal interventions to more invasive surgeries for implanting devices to ease pain.
Starting Your Pain Intervention Journey
Thankfully for chronic pain patients, most interventional pain procedures do not require IV access or sedation. The bulk of procedures begin with an injection of local anesthetic to provide rapid pain relief, alongside an anti-inflammatory agent known as a glucocorticoid. Beginning with this procedure not only provides temporary reduction of pain, but also helps physicians confirm the beneficial impact of the procedure and if more intensive options need to be considered. Patients that don't experience adequate relief from this may have to move on to ablation procedures, where precise nerve destruction interrupts the conduction of pain signals to the brain. These procedures can provide longer-term benefits but are more invasive and reserved for patients with extreme breakthrough pain.
Meet Dr. Dooley, Pain Management Medical Provider at Hammond-Henry Hospital.
John B. Dooley, MD is the pain management expert at Hammond-Henry Hospital with over 36 years of experience in the field. His personal goal in his work is committing himself to improving every patient's quality of life by providing a wide spectrum of interventional pain management techniques.
COMMON CONDITIONS TREATED
- Joint pain
- Extremity pain
- Neck, thoracic, and lumbar spine pain
- All forms of chronic pain (does not include acute post-surgical pain)
PRIMARY SERVICES
- Upper and lower extremity joint injections
- Spinal epidural steroid injections
- Radio frequency nerve ablation of the spine
- Cancer or osteoporosis vertebral fracture treatments
- Medication management for pain (including cancer and opioid addiction)
The Next Steps For Your Pain Management
Hammond-Henry Hospital Pain Clinic – Visits, Exams, Follow-ups
- At your initial visit, you will complete new patient paperwork, describe your medical history, and provide an overview of pain being experienced.
- Dr. Dooley will verbally review your health history with you, along with a physical exam.
For the actual exam, you are taken to a treatment room.
- A medical assistant will review your health history to ensure an accurate recording, then take and record your blood pressure.
- Dr. Dooley will review the history of your pain problem and any prior treatment with you.
- You will be assessed for a source of pain as it relates to a specific structure of the body.
- After your physical examination, your options and possible line of treatment will be presented to you.
- You may receive recommendations for further diagnostic evaluation with tests or imaging.
- Follow-up appointments are in 30 days , or sooner if test results are reviewed or treatment plans need changed.
Enjoy a Life with Less Pain at Hammond-Henry Hospital
Dr. Dooley sees patients at the Pain Clinic, located at the Geneseo Surgical Clinic in Suite 220 of Hammond-Henry Hospital. To schedule an appointment call (309) 944-1595. No referrals needed. Insurance is accepted including BCBS, UHC, and Medicare (inquire about other insurance carriers).