Articles by Laxmaiah Manchikanti, MD
and Mahendra Sanapati, MD

What is Interventional Pain Management?

Each specialty in medicine has an official definition. These definitions come from an organization called the National Uniform Claims Committee. As with other specialties this committee derived the definition for interventional pain management after consulting with scientists, physicians, patients, and health policy makers.

In layman’s terms, interventional pain management is a specialty of medicine concentrating on the diagnosis and treatment of pain by applying various types of treatments, but mainly interventional techniques. These interventional techniques not only manage difficult cases, but occasionally simple cases. Ones where surgery is not indicated or other methods have failed to identify the cause of pain, even when using traditional testing methods like physical examination, x-rays, MRI and CT scanning, as well as nerve conduction studies.

In interventional pain management settings, the pain is treated with a combination of various techniques which address multiple conditions when other types of treatments have failed to provide significant improvement. We apply all traditional techniques including physical therapy, education and behavior modification, drug therapy, and structured exercise programs. All traditional techniques are applied in conjunction with interventional techniques to provide maximum effect, or you may say “best bang for the buck.