Patient breathing through a mask during respiratory quotient (RQ) metabolic testing at Padda Institute, St. Louis

Lifestyle medicine for pain · St. Louis

Lifestyle Medicine

Lifestyle medicine treats the terrain your pain sits in. That means sleep and body-clock timing, food, movement, and blood markers of metabolism and inflammation. It also means the magnesium, vitamin D and B vitamin shortfalls that are rarely checked. That terrain decides how well shots and medicine hold. Fill out the form and we will contact you.

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Call (314) 481-5000Text (314) 886-5902

Same-day and emergency appointments are available.

What is lifestyle medicine for chronic pain?

Two patients with the same MRI do not have the same pain. They do not respond the same way to the same shot. The difference is usually the terrain — sleep, food, metabolic health, movement and how much inflammation the tissue sits in.

Lifestyle medicine is how we treat that terrain on purpose instead of hoping it fixes itself. Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP holds a Metabolic Health Practitioner credential alongside board certification in Obesity Medicine, Addiction Medicine, Pain Medicine, Interventional Pain Management and Anesthesiology.

Diagnostic ultrasound cart and exam table at Padda Institute, St. Louis

What does lifestyle medicine for pain include?

  • Sleep and circadian alignment — including light at night, which shuts down the body’s repair window.
  • Nutrition — whole food, enough protein and healthy fat. Less refined carbohydrate and fewer industrial seed oils, which drive glycation (sugar damage to tissue) and inflammation.
  • Movement — activity that builds step by step. It also boosts your body’s own opioid signals.
  • Metabolic and inflammatory testing — measured, not assumed.
  • Nutritional deficiencies — low magnesium, vitamin D and B vitamins are common and rarely checked.

Can lifestyle changes reduce the need for pain medication?

Chronic pain is often an outgrowth of whole-body metabolic inflammation, not just a neurological (nerve) event. That is why we screen metabolic markers before we build a plan. It is also why patients who fix sleep and food often need less medicine and fewer repeat procedures to function just as well.

Do not start, stop, or change any medication without consulting your physician. Individual results vary.

Counseling and group therapy room at Padda Institute, St. Louis

How does poor sleep make pain worse?

One bad night is measurable

Krause and colleagues, in Matthew Walker’s lab, published The Pain of Sleep Loss in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2019. Lost sleep turned up pain response in the brain’s touch and body-sense areas. At the same time it blunted the circuits that normally turn pain signals down.

That is why we treat sleep here as a medical target, not lifestyle advice. It is also why broken sleep is one half of what we call opioid bankruptcy.

Related Reading

Wide view of the interventional procedure suite with C-arm fluoroscopy during a procedure at Padda Institute, St. Louis

Fix the Terrain, and the Treatment Holds

Serving St. Louis, St. Louis County and St. Charles, with patients from across Missouri and Illinois. Call or text us to talk about whether this fits your plan.

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What Our Patients Say

Individual results vary. These are unpaid patient testimonials shared with permission and are not a guarantee of outcome. See all patient stories.

Lifestyle Medicine: Frequently Asked Questions

It is treating, on purpose, the daily inputs that decide whether tissue heals or stays inflamed. Those are sleep and body-clock timing, food, movement, light and stress. In a pain practice it is not an add-on to the real treatment — it is the terrain that decides how well the real treatment holds.

Because you can measure it and it moves pain fast. Deep sleep is when the body recharges its own pain-control systems. Krause and colleagues showed this in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2019. Lost sleep turns up pain response in the brain's sensory areas. It also blunts the circuits that normally turn that signal down. One bad night lowers your pain threshold the next day.

Metabolic and inflammation markers, plus the nutrient shortfalls that are common in chronic pain and rarely looked for. Lab normal ranges are built from a broad, mostly unwell population. So sitting at the bottom of normal is not the same as having what tissue needs to repair.

They overlap and often run together, but they are not the same. Lifestyle medicine is the base — sleep, food quality, movement, body-clock timing. Medical weight loss adds structured coaching, food counseling and, when it fits, prescription medicine. See medical weight loss.

No. A structural problem still needs structural treatment. This is not a reason to stop anything you have been prescribed. What it does is cut how much work the medicine and the procedures must do. That is what makes lower doses and longer gaps between treatments possible. Do not start, stop, or change any medication without consulting your physician. Individual results vary.

Padda Institute Center for Interventional Pain Management, 4477 Woodson Rd, Suite 100, St. Louis, MO 63134, with a second location at 12174 Natural Bridge Rd, St. Louis, MO 63044. Book at painmd.tv/appointment/, call (314) 481-5000 or text (314) 886-5902.

In this practice it covers five areas. Sleep and body-clock timing, including cutting light at night. Food built on whole food, enough protein and healthy fat, with less refined carbohydrate and fewer industrial seed oils. Movement that builds step by step. Metabolic and inflammation testing, so nothing is assumed. And checking for the magnesium, vitamin D and B vitamin shortfalls that are common and rarely looked for.

Here, lifestyle medicine sits inside a doctor-led pain practice. Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP holds a Metabolic Health Practitioner credential alongside board certification in Obesity Medicine, Addiction Medicine, Pain Medicine, Interventional Pain Management and Anesthesiology. That is why metabolic markers are screened before a plan is built. It is also why this work runs alongside procedures and medicine instead of replacing them.

References

  • Krause AJ, Prather AA, Wager TD, Lindquist MA, Walker MP. The pain of sleep loss: a brain characterization in humans. J Neurosci. 2019;39(12):2291–2300. PMID 30692228.
  • Messier SP, Beavers DP, Queen K, et al. Effect of diet and exercise on knee pain in patients with osteoarthritis and overweight or obesity: a randomized clinical trial. JAMA. 2022;328(22):2242–2251. PMID 36511925.
  • Lean ME, Leslie WS, Barnes AC, et al. Primary care-led weight management for remission of type 2 diabetes (DiRECT): an open-label, cluster-randomised trial. Lancet. 2018;391(10120):541–551. PMID 29221645.

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Prefer not to fill in a form?

Call (314) 481-5000Text (314) 886-5902

Same-day and emergency appointments are available.

Part of our complete guide to Interventional Pain Management in St. Louis.