Dr Nahas uses an integrative personalised approach that focused on symptoms and their root causes. While chronic pain affects over 100 million Americans, the specific causes and factors contributing to your pain are as unique as you are.
Your assessment will include a complete inventory of prior injuries and tissue trauma, including medical and dental procedures. This personalized body map will guide your procedure, which may include neural therapy, trigger point injections, prolotherapy, perineural injections or ultrasound-guided procedures, integrated with acupuncture, myofascial release, neuromodulation, breathing and mindfulness.
Using a palpation-guided injection technique, Dr Nahas can pinpoint the precise sources of your pain, targeting sensitised nerves and damaged tissues. His unique approach is highly effective, providing most patients with immediate results from their first visit.
Most patients experience immediate pain relief that lasts for several days, and those with mild-to-moderate pain should expect lasting results within about three procedures. If you have a severe, complex pain syndrome, you will likely require more treatment, but you should still expect immediate pain relief and consistent progress over time. You should expect pain in fewer areas, with milder, less frequent pain flares, improved function and quality of life.
All procedures are performed with a nurse present. You will need to partially undress, so you should bring shorts and a tank top or t-shirt.
Dr Nahas’s mission is to advance medicine by advocating for a paradigm shift in healthcare, which he calls blockage-based care. This is based on the idea that there are traces left behind after any trauma or injury. It presumes that these traces, which can include scars, can be inflamed, tight, numb, stiff or swollen, or they may be totally silent. These are the weak links in your anatomy, and the hot spots in your physiology. The hypothesis is that tissue tension, sensitized nerves and local inflammation in these areas contributes directly to chronic sympathetic activation, chronic inflammation, neurodegeneration and all of the chronic diseases of aging.
While most patients and providers are focused on finding the specific structures or tissues that are causing their pain, chronic pain is now seen as a disease of the nervous system, which includes the nerves, the spine and the brain. Cutting-edge research in mind-body medicine has revealed that this is just one part of a regulatory network, which has been described as the Psycho-Immuno-Neuro-Endocrine (PINE) system, affecting your hormones, your immune system, and your behaviours, thoughts and emotions.
The epidemic of chronic pain that afflicts most Western societies reflects the gaps in our current scientific understanding. Many advanced treatments can target specific painful lesions, but a significant majority of people are not ideal candidates for these procedures. Many people with chronic pain have already tried these approaches, unfortunately without success. While other factors may limit your response, this program will benefit most patients, even those with severe, chronic pain.
Dr Nahas believes that a blockage-based approach is a missing link in medicine, and is developing tools and programs with the ambitious goal of curing chronic pain. Just as a broken bone must be immobilized for several weeks to allow the fracture to heal, the brain, spine and nerves needs time to heal. If you are able to commit to regular physiotherapy, manual or movement therapy and self-care, a blockage-based approach will deliver more long-term results.
We work with most insurance providers, but we do not accept Medicare. Treatment is usually repeated every 2-4 weeks as needed. Prescription medications may be used to help manage your symptoms, but more commonly these are discontinued as your healing progresses. To find out more about his approach, or to schedule a consultation with Dr Nahas, click here.