Why is it so important for a patient to trust their care for treating spine and neck pain to a team of providers that provide the entire spectrum of specialties to treat their symptoms?

One of the fantastic things about our spine care here at Iowa Ortho is that we truly have the continuity of care – and the continuum of care for all our patients with spine and pain issues. We help triage our patients into the spine clinic and from there, help decide with the patient if they're more interested in pain management or if it's something that truly is surgical – that they would need to see one of our spine surgeons. Having all that continuity in-house I think is very important for comprehensive care for our patients.

What are the most common complaints patients have when it comes to pain and how are those symptoms diagnosed?

Oftentimes we’ll have patients who come in with a multitude of areas of pain that they're really concerned about. Oftentimes its neck pain, (pain) radiating to the shoulders, maybe down the arms or maybe some low back pain, radiating down the legs. We usually start – we’re able to do x-rays here in-house.

What non-surgical treatment options do patients have for spine and neck pain?

A very important part of spine care and pain is physical therapy. So oftentimes, we're referring out for physical therapy and we're fortunate to have a fantastic physical therapist here in town that we work very closely with to help get the patient's pain under control. It helps teach them exercises and activities to do at home as well as help strengthen the core in the muscles surrounding the spine, which is an integral part of improvement.

Other times, if we've done the therapy and we've done the anti-inflammatory medications, often we move forward to an MRI of the spine. (The MRI) helps guide us more as to if it's something surgical or more pain management pending on what the results show. Sometimes patients see significant improvement after a month of physical therapy, trying their anti-inflammatories, maybe muscle relaxants, steroids – things like that. Other times, if patients do have persistent symptoms that are significantly impacting their quality of life, we can move forward with doing different sorts of injections in the spine with our interventional pain management team. Those can include epidural injections, radiofrequency ablation – sometimes trigger point injections. We have a lot of different options were able to offer here.

What other treatment options may a patient have access to with Iowa Ortho providers?

If after a patient has really exhausted all our conservative treatments, we oftentimes think about getting one of our spine surgeons involved to see if this really is appropriate surgical candidate and if we think of spine surgery, would significantly positively impact their quality of life here at Iowa Ortho. We have to spine surgeons who are fantastic and that once the patient is in-house, we do have easy access to them.

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