Pain Management

For those who are struggling with pain, relief can’t come soon enough. That’s where Owensboro Health Medical Group Pain Management comes in.

More than 116 million people experience chronic pain daily that severely impacts their quality of life and ability to participate in normal activities.

The goal of our experienced and caring staff is to provide a balanced approach when treating acute and chronic pain. Patients will also be educated about the appropriate use of pain medication.

Pain Types and Sources

Pain can take multiple forms. We break it down by how long a person has been in pain:

  • Acute: This kind of pain happens right away after an injury.
  • Chronic pain: This is pain that lasts for longer periods of time. It’s often connected to a previous injury, but that is not always the case. Some types of pain happen long after an injury has healed, such as pain associated with certain malfunctions in the body’s nerve system. 

Pain also can come from many different sources. Some of these include:

  • Mechanical pain: This usually refers to back pain caused by injury, originating in the spine itself or in nearby muscle or nerve tissue.
  • Inflammatory pain: When an injury occurs, the body’s natural immune response can cause pain and swelling at the site of the damage.
  • Muscular pain: Occurring in any muscle throughout the body, this kind of pain is usually related to injuries. It can also happen when muscles are overused, overly tense or when a person is under stress.
  • Neuropathic pain: In certain cases, the nerves themselves may be the source of pain. This can be due to injury, but also can happen without an injury, or even after an injury has healed.

Why Treat Pain?

Pain isn’t just an unpleasant sensation. In more severe cases, pain can prevent people from living or enjoying life. It can interfere with work or leisure activities or prevent people from enjoying relationships with friends, family and loved ones. Over time, pain can also have negative effects on a person’s mind, increasing the risk of problems like depression or anxiety.

How We Approach Pain

Our patients are whole people, not just a problem or a symptom. When we treat them, we work to treat the whole person, starting with the most visible problem, and then working from there. That includes offering our patients care related to their pain, such as physical therapy to overcome previous injuries or behavioral health care to ease related depression or anxiety.

Tools We Use

Pain management uses a wide variety of techniques and technologies to get results for our patients. Some of our most useful tools include:

  • Guided injections: Using imaging techniques like ultrasound and X-ray, we can deliver medications to the right place with a high degree of accuracy.
  • Nerve blocks: Thanks to various treatment methods, we can often stop pain nerve signals from reaching the brain. This can partially or completely stop the feeling of pain, depending on its location and cause.
  • Nerve ablations: Precision-guided radio frequency energy can reduce the ability of nerves to transmit pain. This treatment can reduce or prevent pain for up to one year, or even longer.
  • Spinal cord stimulation: The nervous system transmits pain using electrical signals. We can apply low-intensity electrical stimulation to override pain sensations. This is especially useful in cases of pain in the extremities.
  • Medication: A wide range of pharmaceutical products exists, including muscle relaxers, anti-inflammation medications, creams and prescription pain medications. Depending on a patient’s needs, including short- and long-term treatment plans, we may use different approaches.

Diagnosis & Treatment

Our physician and clinical staff are trained to provide the most advanced treatments in the management of pain. The treatments are more tolerable, less invasive and very effective in helping patients take back their lives. We treat conditions such as:

  • Arthritis pain in neck or lower back
  • Back sciatica pain
  • Chronic pelvic pain, including interstitial cystitis
  • Headaches
  • Neck pain and pinched nerves
  • Nerve damage or muscle spasm pain
  • Persistent pain after back or neck surgery
  • Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD)
  • Shingles pain

Treatments Options For Pain

  • Celiac plexus block
  • Discography/spinal diagnostic procedures (cervical, thoracic, lumbar)
  • Facet joint injection
  • Intradiscal Electrothermal Therapy (IDET)
  • Myoneural injection (with or w/out Botox)
  • Radiofrequency ablation
  • Selective nerve root block
  • Spinal cord stimulation (SCS)
  • Stellate ganglion block

In most cases, pain management services are covered by insurance.

Protecting Our Patients

The safety and well-being of our patients is always our top priority. To help safeguard our patients and our communities, we follow all applicable state and federal laws regarding pain treatment, including medications. This includes the use of the following:

  • Kentucky All-Schedule Prescription Electronic Reporting (KASPER): This real-time computer database tracks how and when patients are prescribed controlled substances. It prevents “doctor-shopping” and helps providers to be sure they are prescribing safely.
  • Medication tracking: We help our patients monitor how they take their medication, ensuring they are using these prescriptions safely and at the appropriate times.
  • Lab testing: Our patients may be asked to take lab tests to ensure they are taking their medication appropriately. This ensures that they are taking proper care of themselves and not endangering others by misusing their prescriptions.

Patient compliance with doctor instructions is critical. If patients are found to be non-compliant, we are bound by law to stop treating them. This is to protect the patient from abusing medication or to protect others from getting access to an improperly using medications which were not prescribed to them. This also protects our providers’ ability practice and help those in need.

Messages from our patients

Read the messages sent to our pain management providers on National Doctors' Day.

"I want to thank you for never giving up on trying to find a way to relieve my pain and give me a better quality of life. Before I came to you I had gone to a couple of doctors who had said that nothing was really wrong with me and that eventually the pain would go away. I felt hopeless and pushed off to the side like I was crazy. You not only took me seriously by taking an x-ray and MRI, but pinpointed the problem and set out on a mission to allow me to be able to function at my job again, take care of my family and give me my smile back. Even though I will most likely live with this for many years to come, it's alright because with an amazing doctor like you in my corner never giving up on me, I will never give up on myself." - Misty


"Dear Dr. Lee, I just wanted to take an opportunity to express my gratitude to you for not only your continued care of my health needs, but also your personal interest in having what I know to be an honest ongoing evaluation of my health needs. Thank you for always listening during the times of my visits and for the empathetic care that any patient deserves from their physician. I want you to know that I not only appreciate your professional care and expertise, but that when you speak and interact with me on my visits, you actually speak to me eye to eye without consulting a computer or trying to do tasks on an electronic device while giving me your professional advice for my care. Thank you for your long difficult road of experience and education that is used in such a way to care for your many patients." - Gene


"Thank you for you care you are a wonderful doctor." - Bertha