If you live in Berkeley, we are almost certainly the closest interventional pain practice to you. Our main office at 4477 Woodson Rd, Suite 100 shares the 63134 ZIP code with Berkeley. It sits right beside Lambert International Airport. From most Berkeley addresses that is a few minutes on surface streets, with no highway.
Interventional pain treatment is a series of steps, not one visit. First comes a consult and exam. Then there is usually a diagnostic block to confirm which part is causing the pain. Then comes a treatment picked from what that block showed. Then a follow-up to see whether it held.
Patients who face a forty-minute drive for each step often quit partway through. A workup dropped halfway is worse than never starting. You paid the cost and lost the time, and you still have no answer.
A few minutes away changes that math entirely. It also makes a same-day visit for sudden pain something you can really use, not just a promise.
Woodson runs south from Berkeley past the airport. From the Airport Road or Frost Avenue side, follow Woodson south. The office is on the right, with ground-level parking on site. From I-170, exit toward Woodson. You never need to get on I-70.
Berkeley sits against the airport. A lot of people here work nights, rotating shifts or odd hours, because that is what the nearby employers run on. That bears directly on pain, and it usually gets left out of the talk.
Lost sleep makes you more sensitive to pain, and it can be measured. It turns up the brain areas that register pain and turns down the circuits that normally quiet it. So the same injury hurts more in someone who is not sleeping. A body clock knocked off schedule also worsens insulin resistance and inflammation. Both slow tissue healing.
The result: two patients with the same scans can have very different pain. Treating the structure alone will fall short in the one who is not sleeping. That is why sleep and circadian timing are treated here as clinical targets, not filed under general advice. It is also why Dr. Padda’s board certification in obesity medicine sits right next to interventional pain, not apart from it.
Pain with a clear source: sciatica and pain running down the leg, low back and neck pain, diabetic neuropathy, knee and hip pain, headache, injuries after a car accident, and pain that lingers after surgery.
We are an interventional practice. Our starting point is simple. Pain has a source, the source can usually be found, and treating it beats managing the symptom forever.
This practice cuts opioid use rather than keeping it going. Interventional treatment exists so pain can be controlled without raising doses. Dr. Padda is certified in addiction medicine, so a taper can be run here by someone who knows the drugs. Maybe you want a practice that will keep an existing prescription going unchanged. If so, we are not it, and it is fairer to say so now than after you make the trip.
Most major plans, including Medicare, are accepted. We do not require a referral; some plans do before they cover the visit. Our staff checks your exact benefits before anything is booked. You will hear your expected share beforehand, not afterward.
Being minutes away matters most on the day something goes wrong. A back that has locked up, a sudden change in leg pain, a flare that has knocked you off your feet — these do not wait for the next opening three weeks out.
The emergency room is the right place for red-flag symptoms. These are loss of bladder or bowel control, weakness in a limb that keeps getting worse, numbness in the saddle area, or fever with back pain. Those need an ER right away. Short of that, an ER visit for chronic or flaring pain usually means a long wait, an X-ray, and a prescription on the way out. Nobody figures out why the pain is happening.
We hold open slots for same-day and emergency appointments for exactly that gap. When you call, describe how bad it is instead of just asking for the next opening. It changes how you are booked.
We share the 63134 ZIP code with Berkeley. From most addresses it is a few minutes on surface streets.
For sudden pain, usually. Call and describe how bad it is instead of just asking for the next opening.
Office hours are 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. Tell the scheduler your shift pattern and they will work with it.
Any imaging you have, a list of current medications, and a short history of what you have already tried. Old imaging often saves you a repeat scan.
For a fuller list of what to bring, read What Actually Happens at a First Interventional Pain Appointment.
Not as the main treatment here. This is an interventional practice. Our view is that pain has a source, the source can usually be found, and treating it beats managing the symptom forever. The goal is to control pain without raising doses. Dr. Padda is certified in addiction medicine, so a taper can be run in the same office. If you want an existing prescription kept going unchanged, this is not that practice.
Most major plans are accepted, including Medicare. You do not need a referral from us, though some plans require one before they cover the visit. Our staff checks your exact benefits before anything is booked. You hear your expected share beforehand, not afterward.
Call us or request an appointment. Both offices are listed on the locations page, and credentials on our pain management doctors page.
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Same-day and emergency appointments are available.