CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – There are thousands of people in our community who struggle with chronic joint pain on a daily basis.  While some look to various medications or cortisone shots to find some relief, others learn to live with the daily discomfort and just reduce their activities.

However, one Charlottesville woman refused to accept the fact that she was losing her mobility due to nearly unbearable pain in her knees when she was still relatively young. As Susan T. (as she’ll be referred to in this article to protect her privacy) began looking into options in a desperate effort to avoid a double knee replacement surgery, she was encouraged by a friend to look into one other option before pursuing a surgical options.

” My colleagues noticed me limping around [the office] for a couple of months and finally this last couple of weeks the pain has been so bad that its taken a herculean effort just to walk across the hallway,” Susan said on the Advanced Pain Management of Virginia podcast. “My friend noticed me in pain and suggested that I go see Dr. Wagner at Advanced Pain Management and its been a really interesting experience, I went in and they did a full consult and looked at all of what was going on in my entire body, not just my knees which is where all of my pain has been. So, I just assumed that there was something really going on with my knees that maybe the arthritis that I have in there was gonna cause me to have to have a knee replacement”

Susan said. However, what Susan didn’t realize is that after going through the preliminary scans by the team at Advanced Pain Management, she would learn something about the origin of her knee pain that she had never considered.

“It turns out that an accident that I had about thirty years ago is what’s causing the problem. Degradation at the base of my neck is causing my entire body to be out of whack and its causing me to have extreme pain in my knees and I’ve had enough. So Dr. Wagner’s put together a customized plan for me over the next twelve weeks” Susan said.

Dr. Scott Wagner, the founder and owner of Advanced Pain Management of Virginia, which is located in the Seminole Square shopping center in Charlottesville, has built a multidisciplinary practice based in regenerative medicine that offers non-surgical solutions to chronic pain. That approach is definitely attractive to those who are apprehensive about having joint replacement surgery. Wagner explained on the podcast that often to root cause of a person’s chronic pain has nothing to do with the area that they are experiencing the discomfort, its just that the body has had to compensate for another area in a person’s physique that has been affected.

“The patient’s motivation of coming into a doctor is because of what they feel. The testing should be explaining to them, I think with her explanation we heard that she not only wanted to know what’s wrong with what she felt, but what I told her was all the contributing factors that were hurting her case,” Wagner said on the Advanced Pain Management of VA podcast. “You have to look at mechanics, you have to look at inflammatory markers, you have to look at medical history and then you need to show evidence. You need to show the patient the evidence that you have and make sure they connect that evidence to why she got here.”

Wagner explained: “Once they get that, its a relief, because a lot of people have learned to just live with stuff until it gets too bad and her story sounds like she was feeling bad but able to live with it and push through it but then all of a sudden they can’t.”

Wagner places patients on a 12-16 week program based in lifestyle changes that can help them achieve sustainable pain relief without relying on surgery on medications based in pain management. The program is customized and can include regenerative medicine techniques that utilize stem cell treatments aimed at reducing the inflammation that causes chronic pain in the joints, along with exercises designed to strengthen areas around the impacted joints.

“So the first thing is giving them that feeling that they can move again and not worry about what’s coming up in the future and now we teach them what they need to do for their individual lifestyle and their own body mechanics whether the past history was bad or not and now they have a solution,” Wagner said.

He believes the program has to be long-term even after the symptoms of pain subside to make sure that they won’t eventually come back. Wagner’s message to his patients is to stick to the plan.  You can listen to the entirety of the latest Advanced Pain Management of Virginia podcast below: