If you live in Berkeley, we are almost certainly the closest interventional pain practice to you. Our main office at 4477 Woodson Road, Suite 100 shares the 63134 ZIP code with Berkeley and sits directly beside Lambert International Airport. For most Berkeley addresses that is a few minutes on surface streets, with no highway involved.
Interventional pain treatment is a sequence, not an appointment. There is a consultation and examination, then usually a diagnostic block to confirm which structure is generating the pain, then a treatment chosen on the basis of what that block showed, then follow-up to see whether it held.
Patients facing a forty-minute drive for each of those steps frequently stop partway through. A diagnostic process abandoned halfway is worse than not starting — you have absorbed the cost and the inconvenience and still have no answer.
A few minutes away changes that arithmetic entirely. It also makes a same-day appointment for acute pain genuinely usable rather than theoretical.
Woodson Road runs south from Berkeley past the airport. From the Airport Road or Frost Avenue side, follow Woodson Road south; the office is on the right with ground-level parking on site. From I-170, exit toward Woodson Road. You never need to get onto I-70.
Berkeley sits against the airport, and a substantial number of people here work nights, rotating shifts or irregular hours because that is what the surrounding employers run on. That is directly relevant to pain, and it is usually left out of the conversation.
Sleep deprivation measurably raises pain sensitivity. It amplifies activity in the brain regions that register pain while blunting the circuits that normally dampen it, so the same injury produces more pain in someone who is not sleeping. Disrupted circadian timing also worsens insulin resistance and inflammation, and both of those slow tissue healing.
The practical consequence is that two patients with identical scans can have very different pain, and that treating the structure alone will underperform in the one who is not sleeping. That is why sleep and circadian timing are treated here as clinical targets rather than filed under general advice. It is also why Dr. Padda’s board certification in obesity medicine sits alongside interventional pain rather than separately from it.
Pain with an identifiable source: sciatica and radiating leg pain, low back and neck pain, diabetic neuropathy, knee and hip pain, headache, injuries after a car accident, and pain persisting after surgery.
We are an interventional practice. The premise is that pain has a source, that the source can usually be identified, and that treating it beats managing the symptom indefinitely.
This practice reduces opioid burden rather than sustaining it. Interventional treatment exists so that pain can be controlled without escalating doses, and Dr. Padda’s addiction medicine certification means a taper can be managed here by someone who understands the pharmacology. If what you are looking for is a practice that will continue an existing prescription unchanged, we are not it, and it is fairer to say so now than after you have made the trip.
Most major plans including Medicare are accepted. We do not require a referral; some plans do in order to cover the visit. Our staff verifies your specific benefits before anything is scheduled, and you will be told your expected portion beforehand rather than 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 taken you off your feet — these do not wait for the next available appointment three weeks out.
An emergency room is the right place for red-flag symptoms: loss of bladder or bowel control, progressive weakness in a limb, numbness in the saddle area, fever with back pain. Those need an ED and they need it immediately. Short of that, an ED visit for chronic or flaring pain typically produces a long wait, an X-ray, and a prescription at discharge — without anyone establishing why the pain is happening.
We hold capacity for same-day and emergency appointments for exactly that gap. When you call, describe the severity rather than simply asking for the next opening; it changes how you are scheduled.
We share the 63134 ZIP code with Berkeley. For most addresses it is a surface-street drive of a few minutes.
For acute pain, usually. Call and describe the severity rather than 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 has already been tried. Prior imaging often saves repeating a scan.
Call (314) 481-5000 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.