Pain Treatment Center

Innovative nonsurgical solutions

targeted to your specific pain.

Here at Pain Treatment Center, we know it is often better to treat the condition that is causing your pain without surgery. We offer many innovative nonsurgical procedures that are safe and can promote your body’s own healing abilities. To ensure accuracy, these procedures are performed with specialized imaging equipment.

Dr. McKellar treats a patient with the aid of medical imaging technology

Some of these diagnostic and therapeutic treatment methods include:

Discography:: Known as “provocation lumbar discography,” this diagnostic procedure helps us pinpoint the disc(s) that are causing pain as well as their shape and condition.
Radiofrequency procedures:: With radiofrequency, we deliver thermal energy into nerves that are causing pain. Heating these nerves stops them from delivering painful sensations to the brain, thereby controlling your pain. We use radiofrequency to address certain types of chronic pain, low back pain, sciatic pain, and more.
Epidural steroid injections:: We perform epidural steroid injections to help reduce inflammation and provide pain relief from a number of conditions, including nerve root irritation, sciatica, disc-generated pain and spinal fractures.
Caudal epidural steroid injections:: These are designed to treat inflammation or irritation of the spinal nerves. Common causes of this include bulging discs, spinal stenosis and scar tissue from previous spine injury. Our caudal epidural steroid injections can provide welcome relief from your toughest spinal pain.

Advanced nerve blocks:

We perform a number of advanced nerve blocks, including:

Medical branch block:: This is a diagnostic block that can determine if neck or back pain is originating from the small facet joints of the spinal column.
Sympathetic nerve block:: Can determine if pain is traveling along the sympathetic nerve chain, which is a network of nerves extending the length of the spine.
Selective nerve block:: Is useful in both the diagnosis and treatment of back and leg pain; therefore, it is both a diagnostic as well as a therapeutic procedure.

Spinal cord stimulator (SCS):

With this procedure, a spinal cord stimulator is implanted to deliver low levels of electrical energy to the spinal cord. SCS is currently the only procedure that we perform in the hospital.

Vertebroplasty:

This minimally invasive procedure is used to treat vertebral compression fractures. It involves the injection of an acrylic “bone cement” into the collapsed vertebral body through the guidance of digital imaging. The cement hardens in approximately ten minutes, fusing together the crushed bone fragments that, prior to treatment, caused pain when you moved.

Medication management:

As anesthesiologists, the doctors at Pain Treatment Center have applied their vast knowledge of medicine to fulfill an important role in the operating room, which is to make informed medical judgments to ensure patients’ comfort and safety during surgery. As interventional pain medicine specialists, they use this knowledge to ensure that only the appropriate medications are utilized to help control pain. They will only prescribe medication if your individual condition warrants it, and they will closely monitor your progress.