“Pain specialist” is not a protected term. Physicians from anesthesiology, physical medicine, neurology and psychiatry all treat pain, and so do practitioners with no formal pain training at all. If you are trying to work out who to see, the distinction that matters is not the label — it is the training behind it and what the practice is actually equipped to do.
Chronic pain is treated across several specialties, and the differences are real rather than cosmetic.
None of these is the correct answer in the abstract. The correct answer depends on what is generating your pain, which is precisely the thing that has usually not been established yet.
The job is diagnostic before it is therapeutic. A pain specialist should be able to tell you which structure is producing your pain — a disc, a facet joint, a sacroiliac joint, a specific nerve, or a sensitized central nervous system — and should be able to demonstrate it rather than assert it.
That is what separates a specialist from a prescriber. Anyone can escalate a medication. Establishing that the pain is coming from the L4 medial branch nerves, and proving it with a diagnostic block before committing you to anything longer-lasting, requires imaging equipment, procedural training and a willingness to be wrong.
In the United States, pain medicine is a recognized subspecialty entered after a full residency. A physician completes residency in anesthesiology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, neurology, psychiatry or emergency medicine, then undertakes an additional accredited fellowship dedicated to pain medicine before sitting for subspecialty certification.
This is the single most useful thing to ask about, and it is more informative than the words on the door. A practice may advertise pain management without any physician on site who completed that fellowship. That is not necessarily disqualifying — but you should know it, because it tells you what the practice can and cannot investigate.
Primary care is the right starting point for most new pain, and a good primary physician resolves a great deal of it. The reason to move on is not dissatisfaction — it is a stall. When the plan has become “continue and review” for months at a time, the question has changed from how to manage the pain to what is causing it, and that is a different kind of work.
A surgical opinion is the right call when there is a structural problem a surgeon can correct, and when conservative and interventional care have been genuinely exhausted rather than merely tried. Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP is a licensed physician and surgeon with surgical privileges, and this practice does perform surgery — but it leads with the least invasive option that can answer the question, and reserves surgery for when it is the right answer rather than the next step.
Certification is verifiable, and you should verify it. Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP holds five American board certifications, including interventional pain and anesthesiology, and the certifying boards publish their diplomate registries publicly. The full list, with certificate numbers and NPI, is on our pain management doctors page so you can check it independently.
Three checks take a few minutes each and are worth doing for any practice you are considering:
Ask any practice you are considering the same question: what is the physician certified in, and by which board? A practice reluctant to answer that plainly is telling you something.
That last question matters more than most patients realize. This practice reduces opioid burden rather than sustaining it, and says so up front.
None of these is proof of poor care. Each is worth a direct question.
Padda Institute is an interventional practice with offices on Woodson Road in St. Louis and on Natural Bridge Road in Bridgeton. We use ultrasound and fluoroscopic guidance for diagnosis and treatment, and we treat the metabolic and inflammatory drivers alongside the structural ones. The procedures themselves are described on our interventional pain management page, and the broader picture on our pain management in St. Louis page.
Not here. You do not need a referral to be evaluated, and you do not need to be an existing patient. Some insurance plans require one for their own reasons, which is worth checking with your carrier. See our same-day and urgent visit information if the pain is acute.
In ordinary use, yes — the terms are used interchangeably by patients and practices alike. Neither one tells you about training on its own, which is why the fellowship and certification questions above matter more than the title. Our physicians are listed on the pain management doctors page.
That is not the direction of this practice. The work here is aimed at reducing opioid burden rather than sustaining it, and many patients arrive specifically to come down off medication that stopped helping. Read more on opioid stewardship and on whether pain medication can make pain worse.
That is one of the more common reasons people come in, and it usually points to the wrong target rather than a treatment that cannot work. The diagnostic question gets reopened rather than the same injection repeated. See why pain injections stop working.
Yes. The practice is licensed in Missouri and Illinois, and sees patients from across the Metro East including Edwardsville, Maryville, Glen Carbon, Collinsville and Troy.
Same-day appointments are available for acute pain, and same-day procedures are genuinely available rather than same-day evaluation only. Call (314) 481-5000 and ask.
Call (314) 481-5000 or request an appointment. Same-day appointments are available for acute pain. We are licensed in Missouri and Illinois.
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Same-day and emergency appointments are available.