Overview

At Nexus, our passion is caring for and caring about patients.  We know that living with pain is difficult.  It can affect many aspects of a person's life.  We also know that many patients have sought treatment through multiple sources, only to be disappointed.  That is why we not only listen carefully to you, but we also have the means to help you.  Our ability to help patients where others have failed is based on the idea of letting the patient help tell us where the pain is coming from rather than us telling them.  To do this, we use precision diagnostics techniques (numbing a specific structure that may be causing the pain); followed by a precise treatment targeted at the exact structure that is generating the pain source.  

Precision diagnosis is the key to helping patients get out of pain.  We take a through medical history, perform a physical exam and review MRI scans (if indicated), then use this information to decide what structure we think is causing the pain.  We then numb that structure and give the patient a chance to tell us if this temporarily relieved the pain.  If it did, we follow this with a precise treatment.  If the structure that was numbed does not relieve the pain, we cross this off our very short list of things that might be causing the pain and continue to numb different structures until we find the one that is really causing the pain.  

Why don't the physical exam and MRI contain enough information to tell the doctor what is causing the pain.  Why must I go through a painful procedure with a needle?  

Several studies have shown that the physical exam is quite insensitive in discovering the precise cause of pain.  In fact, using the physical exam alone, a doctor is right about the cause of pain only 1 out of 3 times.  The MRI, on the other hand, is too sensitive.  It reveals many abnormalities, some of which may be causing pain, some not.  A study was performed on 100 college age adults, all of whom had no back pain.  Each student had an MRI of the back. The results showed 25 out of the 100 had findings that would be considered a source for pain.  The point is that no one can see, touch or feel your pain.  The only way to know for sure when it is gone is when you tell us it is.  That is why our commitment is to keep working with our patients until they tell us they no longer need our help (that is their pain has been relieved).  

Patients who have been living with daily pain for more than a year often develop other problems as a result of the pain.  They have trouble concentrating, difficulty sleeping, gain or loose weight, and often are in a bad mood.  This can cause problems in relationships both at work and home.  Some patients loose their job.  Some have so much pain they have trouble exercising and, as a result, develop a weight problem.  These things need to be addressed in addition to finding and treating the source of pain.  If we only make the physical body feel better and do not address the emotional body, our patients don't feel better.  That is why we have a multispeciality approach to pain treatment.  We have physical therapists, psychologists, massage therapists and chiropractors on staff to help restore our patients to fully functioning lives.  

We know that our patients don't care how much we know until they know how much we care.  Our goal is to try and form a personal relationship with our patients.  We want to know who you are, as it helps us want to work harder to get you better.  

At Nexus we have a commitment to excellence in education.  We spend a good deal of time educating doctors in our specialty on some of the new techniques we have developed to help patients.  We want to help as many patients as we can by educating as many doctors as we can.  Our doctors spend time every month giving lectures around the country, as well as having doctors fly into our clinic to learn our state-of-the-art procedures.  We also have a small number of fully trained, hand-picked doctors who spend a year with us learning the highly specialized procedures performed by Dr. Richard Rosenthal.