If you live with chronic pain, you have probably been told to manage it — more medication, another injection, and a longer wait for relief that never fully arrives. At the Padda Institute Center for Interventional Pain Management in St. Louis, we start from a different premise: pain is not your diagnosis, it is a signal that something in your nervous system, your metabolism, or your structural anatomy has drifted out of balance. This page explains how interventional pain management works, what procedures we use, and why we pair precise interventions with root-cause metabolic medicine.
Interventional pain management is a physician-led approach that uses targeted, image-guided procedures — nerve blocks, radiofrequency ablation, epidural injections, and related techniques — to interrupt specific pain signals at their source. Instead of relying only on oral medication that circulates through the whole body, an interventional physician identifies the precise nerve or structure generating your pain and treats it directly. Done well, this is diagnostic as much as therapeutic: if a targeted block relieves your pain, it confirms where the signal is coming from.
Every plan is built around your specific presentation, but common interventions include sphenopalatine ganglion (SPG) and stellate ganglion blocks for headache and sympathetically driven pain, occipital nerve blocks for cervicogenic headache, radiofrequency ablation of the facet joints for chronic back and neck pain, and epidural steroid injections for radiating nerve pain. Each targets a different part of the nervous system, and the right choice depends on where your pain is actually coming from — which is what a careful evaluation is designed to determine.
Here is the part you will rarely hear in a typical clinic: an injection-only model can quietly fail you. If we perform a nerve block but ignore chronically high insulin, unaddressed systemic inflammation, or broken sleep, the block is only a temporary silence of the alarm. We use interventional procedures to break the cycle of acute suffering — and then we use that window of relief to address the underlying terrain: your metabolic markers, your inflammatory profile, and your lifestyle. An interventional procedure is the start of a plan, not the destination.
Much of what gets dismissed as “just getting older” is accumulated metabolic damage — glycation, mitochondrial dysfunction, chronic inflammation, and nutrient deficiencies that keep nerves hyperexcitable. Our educational series, The Hidden Drivers of Chronic Pain, walks through these mechanisms one by one so you can understand what may be keeping your pain switched on, and what can actually be changed.
Our facility is located at 4477 Woodson Rd, Suite 100, St. Louis, MO 63134 — minutes from St. Louis Lambert International Airport, so out-of-town patients can arrive, be evaluated, and begin treatment without fragmented, drawn-out care. We focus on outcomes rather than volume, and we perform procedures when the clinical data and your presentation call for them, not simply because they are available.
Interventional pain management is used for chronic conditions such as cluster headaches and migraines, chronic back and neck pain, sciatica, facet joint pain, complex regional pain syndrome, and sympathetically driven pain, among others. The right procedure depends on the source of your pain, which a targeted diagnostic block can help confirm. Individual results vary.
No. A nerve block can interrupt a pain cycle and provide meaningful relief, but at the Padda Institute we treat it as a window to address the underlying drivers — metabolic health, inflammation, and sleep — rather than a standalone cure. Lasting improvement usually depends on treating both the signal and the terrain that produced it. Individual results vary.
No. We deliberately reject the injection-only model. Interventional procedures are combined with metabolic and lifestyle medicine so that we are not repeatedly silencing an alarm without asking why the nervous system is hyperexcitable in the first place.
The Padda Institute Center for Interventional Pain Management is at 4477 Woodson Rd, Suite 100, St. Louis, MO 63134, minutes from Lambert International Airport. You can book an appointment at painmd.tv/appointment/ or call (314) 481-5000.
Medically reviewed by Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP — Board Certified in Anesthesiology, Pain Medicine, Interventional Pain Management, Addiction Medicine, and Obesity Medicine. Last reviewed July 2026.
This article is educational and is not a substitute for evaluation, diagnosis, or treatment by a physician. Individual results vary. Do not start, stop, or change any medication without consulting your physician.
Padda Institute Center for Interventional Pain Management builds a customized, root-cause plan for each patient. Interventional care and metabolic medicine, under one roof in St. Louis.
Or call (314) 481-5000 or text (314) 886-5902 — 4477 Woodson Rd, Suite 100, St. Louis, MO 63134.
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Non-injection modalities and diagnostic testing performed on site, used alongside interventional procedures rather than instead of them.
All procedures below are performed by our board-certified pain management doctors in St. Louis.
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