People come to our clinic after referral from their GP,  Consultants in other specialties or sometimes from the specialist physiotherapists in Gloucestershire's Musculoskeletal Interface Clinics.

In the clinic we aim to provide a careful assessment of patients' pain and general condition, and how the two interact and how this affects their function and vice versa.  We may order appropriate investigations and further tests if required.  We will discuss with the patient what we think is causing the pain or how it is working.  Some pain problems are very difficult to pin down to a straightforward physical cause and a simple curative treatment is often not possible.  However, we will discuss the potential approaches which may help to reduce the pain and equally importantly things that may aid self-management of the pain and reduction of its impact on patients and their function and wellbeing.

Approaches that we can use include the use of specialist medications, techniques using stimulation to produce pain relief, approaches looking at how the interplay of pain and our thinking can change the pain we feel and sometimes injections or other procedures.   These, and some other approaches, are covered separately in individual pages from the menu on the right.

 

Further Reading

In a presentation from the Pain Community Centre in Cardiff Dr Marcia Schofield, a pain specialist, gives some useful background detail.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pain Service Website, Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Webmaster Dr J G de Courcy, Consultant in Pain Medicine and Anaesthesia
email: pain.webmaster[at]glos.nhs.uk