Clinical Care

Living with pain is bad enough in itself, but when it persists it can interfere with life and work, shake patient confidence, disrupt sleep, or prevent patients from leading an active life.

Medications, injections, and other therapies may ease pain, particularly when it is short lived. But for nearly 50 million people whose pain is difficult to pin down and never completely goes away, medical treatments often fall short of providing true relief.

In such cases, the Western New York community looks to our doctors for guidance on how best to understand and address some of the most challenging chronic pain conditions.

Through quality research and care, our faculty and trainees focus on how biological factors interact with behavioral ones — our thoughts, actions, emotions, relationships – to influence pain and its impact in patients’ lives.

Our division's depth of experience and training equips us to understand some of the most challenging chronic pain conditions. Among the disorders we treat are:

• low back and neck pain
• fibromyalgia
• arthritis
• irritable bowel syndrome
• non-cardiac chest pain
• temporomandibular joint disorder
• migraine and tension headaches
• MVA-related injuries
• pelvic pain
• abdominal pain

We recognize that chronic pain is not a psychosomatic problem but a disease in its own right that calls for different solutions than used effectively for short-lived injuries or diseases.

Our patients receive cutting-edge treatments from fellowship trained health psychologists. Our expertise in pain and science-based behavioral treatments are designed to break the vicious cycle of unrelenting pain and suffering.

Because division faculty are nationally known academic clinicians with active research programs, they are uniquely positioned to translate findings into science-backed therapies not yet widely available. These treatment options are customized to each patient’s specific needs.

Chronic pain can be complex, so we take an interdisciplinary approach to patient care.

We work closely with physicians and other health care providers to coordinate and optimize treatment options with the goal eliminating symptoms, minimizing their effects or maximizing pain-free periods. These goals often can be achieved by teaching patients to self-manage pain using skills tested and proven to significantly reduce pain in NIH-funded clinical trials

In addition, we provide expert preoperative psychological assessments for patients who are candidates for:

• spinal card stimulator
• intrathecal morphine pump
• bariatric/metabolic surgery

We also provide opioid risk profiles to assist prescribers in making informed decisions when treatment planning for patients with chronic pain.

We are active in patient advocacy, public health initiatives and public-private partnerships.