Chronic pain is often an incredibly isolating health challenge. Unlike a broken bone or obvious injury, chronic pain is often invisible to friends, family, and even healthcare providers. You might look fine on the outside, even as you deal with constant discomfort that affects every aspect of your daily life, from your sleep and energy levels to your relationships and work performance.
In today's medical landscape, many people struggling with chronic pain find themselves caught between two inadequate options: being told "there's nothing wrong" when initial tests come back normal, or being handed prescription pain medications that mask symptoms without addressing the underlying causes. With the ongoing opioid crisis, many people are seeking safer, more effective approaches to pain management that actually address why they're hurting in the first place.
At The Center for Fully Functional Health, we understand that chronic pain is real and merits comprehensive investigation and treatment. Our physicians never question whether your pain exists – if you say you’re hurting, we won't stop looking until we find out why. More importantly, we won't just treat your symptoms; we'll work to identify and address the root causes while providing immediate holistic relief whenever possible.
Not all pain is the same. Understanding the three different types of chronic pain can provide important clues about what's happening in your body and guide more effective treatment approaches.
Inflammatory Pain: This type of pain results from ongoing inflammation in your body and often feels like burning, aching, or throbbing. It may be accompanied by swelling, stiffness, or warmth in affected areas. Inflammatory pain can stem from autoimmune conditions, food sensitivities, chronic infections, environmental toxins, or gut dysfunction. Common examples include arthritis, fibromyalgia, and pain associated with inflammatory bowel conditions.
Neuropathic Pain: This occurs when nerves themselves are damaged or not functioning properly, often described as shooting, burning, tingling, or electric shock-like sensations. Neuropathic pain can result from conditions like diabetes, vitamin deficiencies, toxin exposure, chronic infections, or trauma. It might present as peripheral neuropathy in hands and feet, or as more generalized nerve pain throughout the body.
Mechanical Pain: This type of pain results from structural issues in muscles, joints, or bones, and often improves with rest and worsens with movement or certain positions. While mechanical pain may require physical therapy or structural interventions, many patients find that addressing underlying inflammation, nutritional deficiencies, and nervous system dysfunction significantly improves their symptoms and healing capacity.
Any pain that persists for more than a few weeks, significantly impacts your daily activities, or doesn't respond to standard treatments needs thorough evaluation. Please seek immediate medical attention if you experience sudden, severe pain; pain accompanied by fever; signs of infection; or any neurological symptoms like numbness, weakness, or loss of function.
It can be hard to evaluate your own pain. When is it too much? What if no one takes it seriously, or it winds up being “nothing”? Many of our patients have delayed treatment for months or years because of these questions. Our answer is clear: If you're experiencing ongoing discomfort that affects your sleep, mood, energy levels, or quality of life, it's time to investigate the underlying causes rather than simply masking the symptoms.
Chronic pain often comes with other symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, digestive issues, mood changes, or sleep disturbances, all of which can offer significant information about the root causes of your discomfort.
What causes chronic pain?
Chronic pain rarely has a single cause. Instead, it typically results from multiple interconnected factors that create and maintain a cycle of inflammation, nervous system dysfunction, and tissue damage. That means proper diagnosis takes patience and attention to detail, with an experienced provider who is willing to listen.
When looking for the causes of common chronic pain such as abdominal, back, or joint pain, we always look at a variety of factors, including:
While that long list might seem overwhelming at first glance, it’s actually good news! It means there are many potential avenues left to explore to understand your chronic pain, and many solutions available to restore your well-being.
One of the most important aspects of chronic pain that conventional medicine often overlooks is the intimate connection between pain, stress, and sleep. Here's how this cycle typically unfolds:
When you're in chronic pain, your nervous system remains in a constant state of high alert, like a smoke alarm that won't stop beeping. This hypervigilant state makes it nearly impossible to achieve the deep, restorative sleep your body needs to heal and repair tissues. Poor sleep then increases inflammation throughout your body and makes your nervous system even more sensitive to pain signals, essentially turning up the volume on your pain.
Meanwhile, chronic stress – either from the pain itself, life circumstances, or past trauma – keeps your body stuck in "fight or flight" mode. Believing you’re in real danger, your body floods your system with stress hormones that increase inflammation and heighten pain perception. This explains why many people notice their pain worsens during stressful periods or improves during relaxing vacations.
The emotional toll of pain adds another layer to this cycle. Chronic pain often leads to anxiety, depression, or feelings of hopelessness that can actually amplify pain signals in the brain. This isn't "all in your head" – it's a real neurological phenomenon where emotional distress literally increases your brain's processing of pain, making everything hurt more.
Understanding all of these connections is crucial because effective pain treatment must address not only the physical causes of pain, but also the nervous system dysregulation, sleep disturbances, and stress factors in this destructive cycle. When we help break the cycle at multiple points simultaneously, patients often experience dramatic improvements in their overall pain levels.
Our approach to chronic pain addresses both immediate symptom relief and long-term healing by identifying and treating the root causes, while also supporting your body's natural pain management and healing systems.
Effective pain treatment begins with understanding what's driving your unique pain pattern. This includes comprehensive testing for chronic infections, autoimmune markers, nutritional deficiencies, hormonal imbalances, toxic load, and inflammatory markers. We also evaluate your sleep quality, stress levels, and nervous system function to understand all the factors contributing to your pain experience.
While we work to identify and treat root causes, we also focus on providing immediate relief through natural, non-habit-forming approaches. Our toolkit includes Red Light Therapy to reduce pain and support cellular healing, Full Spectrum Sauna sessions to decrease inflammation and improve detoxification, IV Therapy with calming nutrients that support nervous system function, and targeted nutritional supplements that interrupt the biochemical cycles involved in chronic pain.
For patients suffering from chronic headaches or migraines, we also offer MeRT Personalized TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation), a cutting-edge treatment that can help rebalance brain activity and reduce pain.
Understanding your specific triggers and imbalances helps our care team create a highly customized care plan. Your treatment might include antimicrobial protocols to address chronic infections, anti-inflammatory dietary approaches and targeted supplementation, bioidentical hormone replacement to restore optimal balance, detoxification support to reduce toxic burden, or stress management techniques and sleep optimization strategies.
Many patients begin experiencing reduced pain levels within weeks of starting their personalized treatment plan, with continued improvement as underlying causes are addressed.
Understanding the deep connections between chronic pain, trauma, anxiety, and depression, we offer comprehensive support for both the physical and emotional aspects of pain. This includes specialized treatments for PTSD, anxiety, and depression that can significantly impact pain perception, as well as one-on-one health coaching for tailored stress management techniques.
After years as emergency medicine physicians, Dr. Ellen and Dr. Scott Antoine certainly understand that there are urgent cases where pain medications are warranted and necessary. However, our goal is always to help patients identify and reduce the factors contributing to their pain, so they can improve their well-being and quality of life without long-term reliance on pain medications.
We work collaboratively with each patient, taking into account their personal needs, comfort level, and goals to create a customized care plan that aims to provide both answers and relief. For patients currently on pain medications, we offer careful, medically supervised approaches to reduce dependence while addressing underlying causes.
Dr. Ellen and Dr. Scott bring a unique perspective to chronic pain treatment, combining decades of emergency medicine experience with advanced training in functional and integrative medicine. Their emergency medicine background gives them deep understanding of pain management and when medications are truly necessary, while their functional medicine expertise allows them to identify and treat the complex root causes that conventional medicine often misses.
Dr. Ellen was among the first 100 functional medicine doctors certified in the United States, and together this award-winning pair of physicians and their team have helped thousands of patients find relief from chronic pain by addressing underlying causes rather than just managing symptoms. They understand personally what it means to live with chronic health challenges, and they approach each patient with genuine empathy and hope.
The Center for Fully Functional Health in Carmel, Indiana, offers a comprehensive toolkit of both traditional and cutting-edge treatments, from advanced laboratory testing and nutritional protocols to Red Light Therapy, MeRT TMS, and IV Therapy. This integrated approach allows us to address chronic pain from multiple angles simultaneously.
Most importantly, we never question the reality of your pain or give up on finding answers. If you're hurting, we'll keep investigating until we understand why, and we'll work tirelessly to help you reclaim a life free from chronic pain.
Don't let chronic pain continue to rob you of living a vibrant, Fully Functional life. Call our supportive team at (317) 989-8463 Monday to Thursday, 8AM to 5PM Eastern, or fill out the simple form below to find out more and schedule your Initial Consult.
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The Center for Fully Functional Health® is led by a team of award-winning, internationally recognized physicians, committed to providing personalized, life-changing care.
