Health First Pain Management Physician Says the Experience of Pain Is Complex, Subjective

Chronic pain may be in your head. That doesn’t mean it’s imaginary.

October 05, 2023

HEALTH FIRST’S REGINA MORRIS SOLIS, MD, is double board-certified in Pain Management and Anesthesiology and on staff at Health First’s The B.A.C.K. Center in Melbourne. “Chronic pain is, by definition, pain that has lasted six months or longer. It can be caused by an injury that has healed but the nerve pathways were involved and now they’re dysfunctional.”

Physicians who specialize in pain management will tell you, the reason pain is hard to target for treatment is that it is difficult to characterize. The experience is highly complex – and subjective.

“We use 11 different scales to rate pain,” says Dr. Regina Morris Solis, a Pain Medicine Provider on staff at Health First’s The B.A.C.K. Center in Melbourne says. “These include numerical rating scales in which numbers are used to rate pain, visual analog scales in which you’re asked to select a picture that best matches your pain level, and categorical scales, which primarily uses words, possibly along with numbers, colors or location(s) on the body.”

A recent study published by researchers at the University of California San Francisco and published in Nature Neuroscience identified chronic pain biomarkers for target by pain management treatment.

Technology that will put this and other recent findings into actionable therapies has not widely come online, but Dr. Morris Solis says that virtually any nerve in the body can be blocked and that your anesthesiologist or pain management doctor will decide what kind of block to use.

READ the full feature in Vero News HERE.