Our Approach to Pain Management
How we help
Our Approach to Pain Management
Chronic pain is complex. Our multidisciplinary team addresses it from five complementary directions — because lasting improvement rarely comes from a single treatment alone.
The Five Pillars of Care
Each pillar is evidence-based and works best in combination with the others. Your treatment plan will draw on whichever pillars are most relevant to your situation.
Education
Understanding how chronic pain works — and why it doesn't always mean ongoing tissue damage — is often the first step toward managing it well. We help you understand your condition, set realistic expectations, and build the knowledge to make informed decisions about your care.
Physical Rehabilitation
Movement-based therapy, guided by physiotherapy, helps restore function and confidence in your body. Programs are graded to your ability and built up gradually, rather than pushing through pain.
Psychological Support & Empowerment
Chronic pain affects mood, sleep, and daily life as much as it affects the body. Our pain psychologists use evidence-based approaches — including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) — to help you build coping strategies and regain a sense of control. As we often say: pain may be inevitable in life, but suffering is optional.
Medication Optimisation
We review your current medications to ensure you're getting the most benefit with the fewest side effects, and work with you toward the lowest effective dose — including reducing reliance on medications like opioids where appropriate.
Interventional Procedures
For some conditions, minimally invasive procedures can help confirm the source of pain and provide meaningful relief, usually alongside the approaches above rather than instead of them.
Interventional Procedure Techniques
Interventional procedures fall into several broad categories. Your specialist will discuss which — if any — are appropriate for your specific condition and circumstances.
Diagnostic Blocks
A local anaesthetic injection near a specific nerve or joint, used to confirm whether it's a source of your pain and provide short-term relief.
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Steroid (Anti-Inflammatory) Injections
Often combined with a block, reducing inflammation around a nerve or joint for longer-lasting relief.
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Pulsed Radiofrequency
Short bursts of energy that calm an overactive nerve without destroying it, aiming for relief lasting weeks to months.
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Thermal Radiofrequency Ablation
Uses heat to disable a nerve for longer-lasting relief, typically considered when pulsed radiofrequency hasn't lasted long enough.
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Chemical Neurolysis
Generally reserved for cancer pain, using chemicals such as alcohol or phenol to destroy the nerves transmitting pain.
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Neurostimulation (Spinal Cord Stimulation)
A trialled, then permanently implanted, device that delivers mild electrical pulses to interrupt pain signals, for select chronic nerve-related pain conditions.
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For detailed patient information on each procedure — including what to expect before, during, and after — visit our Procedures page.
Ready to learn more?
Browse the conditions we treat, explore our full list of procedures, or see how all five pillars come together in practice — our Fibromyalgia page is a worked example of this integrated approach applied to one specific condition.