Glen Carbon sits between Edwardsville and Maryville, which puts it within a few minutes of Anderson Hospital, where Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP holds full staff privileges. We are licensed in Illinois as well as Missouri.
We are an interventional pain practice. The working premise is that pain has an identifiable source, that the source can usually be found, and that treating it beats managing the symptom indefinitely.
We are not a practice that will simply continue an existing opioid prescription without addressing the underlying pain. Dr. Padda is board certified in addiction medicine, and the direction of travel here is reducing medication burden rather than sustaining it. If that is not what you are looking for, it is fairer to say so now than after you have made the drive.
Almost everything we do rests on this one idea, and it is rarely explained to patients before it is done to them. It is worth twelve hundred words of anyone’s attention; here is the short version.
The problem. Low back pain can originate in a disc, a facet joint, a sacroiliac joint or a nerve root. These produce heavily overlapping symptoms, and imaging routinely shows abnormalities in structures that are not causing any pain at all. Examination narrows it. It does not settle it.
The test. A small volume of local anesthetic is placed precisely at one candidate structure — a specific medial branch nerve, a particular nerve root, one joint — under fluoroscopic or ultrasound guidance, with contrast confirming the medication went where it was intended.
The reasoning. If that structure is generating your pain, numbing it should substantially reduce the pain for as long as the anesthetic lasts. If the pain is unchanged, that structure is probably not the source and treating it would have been wasted.
What you are asked to do. You will be asked to record how much relief you got and for how long, often on a simple diary. This is not paperwork. It is the actual result of the test, and a vague recollection a fortnight later is not usable data. Move about afterward and do something that normally hurts — a block assessed while sitting still tells nobody anything.
Why it is sometimes repeated. A single positive block carries a meaningful false-positive rate. Where the next step is something durable such as radiofrequency ablation, confirming with a second block before committing is standard practice and reduces the chance of an ablation that was never going to help.
What a negative result is worth. A block that does not help is not a failure and not a wasted appointment. It has excluded a structure, which is genuinely useful, and it has spared you a longer-lasting procedure aimed at the wrong target. That reframing matters, because patients frequently interpret a negative block as “nothing works for me.”
Our offices are at 4477 Woodson Road, St. Louis and 12174 Natural Bridge Road, Bridgeton. From Glen Carbon, I-270 west across the river and on toward Lambert Airport — roughly thirty minutes in normal traffic.
Because of the distance we try not to make you come twice. Where a diagnostic procedure is clearly indicated and you want to go ahead, it can often be performed the same day as the consultation. Bring any imaging you already have.
Sciatica and radiating leg pain, facet joint and sacroiliac joint pain, knee pain, migraine, and pain persisting after spine surgery.
Bring imaging on disc or via a patient portal rather than only the radiologist’s report, a current medication list, and a note of what has already been tried and what it did. A previous injection that helped briefly is diagnostically useful, and a vague memory of it is not.
Primarily it tests. Relief lasts as long as the anesthetic, though a steroid is sometimes added for longer effect. The lasting treatment is chosen on the basis of what the block showed.
That is the expected result and it is good news — it confirms the target. The next step is a treatment aimed at the same structure with a longer duration.
Light sedation is available, but too much sedation defeats the purpose, since your feedback about the pain is the result being measured.
Within hours. That is the point of the design.
Call (314) 481-5000 or request an appointment. More detail on our Illinois pain management page.
Prefer not to fill in a form?
Same-day and emergency appointments are available.