Pain management

Pain is a very unpleasant experience, especially if it is chronic pain, as it can affect all aspects of your life, including your ability to work, your personal relationships with family and friends, your sleep and your activity levels. 

When you want freedom from acute or chronic pain and discomfort, it is important to have access to effective treatment. Your local Circle Health hospital offers pain management solutions for a broad range of conditions, and our doctors will advise on the most appropriate pain management solution for you. 

Our integrated pain management service focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of painful conditions, including musculoskeletal pain (from joints and muscles) and pain from damaged nerves, such as sciatica.  

Timely pain treatment can prevent pain from escalating and becoming chronic pain, and therefore reduce the need for surgical intervention. 
In order to make an accurate diagnosis and offer effective treatment, our pain management Consultants will regularly liaise with specialists from other surgical and medical areas such as spinal surgery, rheumatology (joints) and neurology (nerves). 

Treatment of your pain is often further enhanced by physical therapy and complementary therapies, such as acupuncture. 

At Circle Health, we are proud to facilitate pain management Consultants who can help test, diagnose, and treat or manage your pain in order to help improve your quality of life. 

People suffer from varied types of pain, which can fall into a number of different categories. If you are experiencing any of the following, you may want to see a pain specialist: 

• Low back pain; 
• Neck pain, including whiplash; 
• Leg pain, including sciatica; 
• Headaches; 
• Facial pain; 
• Nerve pain or 
• Arthritis

Pain management with Circle Health will be carried out by our multidisciplinary team, comprising dedicated Consultants, rheumatologists, surgeons, neurologists, physiotherapists, nurses and more. 
Whether you have chronic or acute pain, our team will strive to reduce your symptoms through effective treatment. 

Epidural for chronic pain relief 

An epidural steroid injection involves injecting drugs, such as local anaesthetics and steroids, into an area called the epidural space which is around and below your spinal cord. The local anaesthetic drugs affect the nerves to relieve pain. The steroids reduce inflammation and may make the pain relief last longer. 

An epidural injection can give you short-term pain relief, allowing you to move around more easily. The treatment usually takes about fifteen minutes. 

Hip injection treatment 

If you have hip pain, a hip joint injection may be considered. A hip injection involves an injection of X directly into the hip joint. It can be used to help diagnose the problem and identify the cause of pain. It may also be used to offer pain relief by reducing inflammation in your hip joint, which is commonly caused by arthritis. 

Hip injection treatment can be performed with local anaesthesia or a combination of local anaesthesia and steroids. It’s performed in the operating theatre with X-ray guidance. 

Pain relief after surgery 

If you have effective pain control after an operation, you are less likely to have a heart attack (where part of the heart muscle dies), a chest infection and blood clots. You should also be able to get up and about more quickly and may go home sooner.  

There are a five main ways of experiencing pain relief during or after an operation. These are:

• Simple painkillers (such as paracetemol); 
• Morphine and other similar painkillers; 
• Local anaesthetic infusions, to help control the pain in the area around your wound; 
• Epidural anaesthetic, where painkillers are injected into the epidural space, near the spinal cord, and  
• Peripheral nerve blocks, which temporarily numb your nerves to give pain relief. 

Booking your pain management treatment with Circle Health differs depending on your condition and recommended treatment option. 

To get started, you can book a consultation online with one of our many experienced pain management Consultants. This is a simple and fast process. You can also book your consultation by calling us.

To familiarise yourself with the many treatment options for pain that we offer, you can read our informative, in-depth treatment pages. This could help you to decide which treatment option might suit you best. 

At your consultation, you will likely receive important diagnostic testing and discuss the right treatment option for you with your Consultant.