Pain Management Services

The Rush Approach to Pain Management

If you suffer from chronic pain, you're not alone. Millions of Americans endure pain that lasts for months, sometimes years. Many have been treated by least one specialist but still haven't found lasting solutions.

Pain doctors at Rush understand the negative impact of pain on your quality of life and state of mind — and we want you to get the relief you deserve. That's why we created comprehensive pain programs at our three Rush hospitals, offering a range of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches with your unique needs in mind.

Our pain specialists see people with orthopedic injuries, migraine, cancer, fibromyalgia, diabetic neuropathy, complex regional pain syndrome and more. We work alongside other specialists — including orthopedic surgeons, cancer experts and mental health professionals — to pinpoint the source of your pain so we can properly address it.

We're experts at finding the right treatment approach to help you get back to enjoying a full, active life. Treatment plans are designed to decrease the frequency and intensity of your pain, improve your ability to function, teach you new coping skills and resolve pain-related sleep disturbances.

Rush Excellence in Pain Management

• Full range of treatments: We offer many ways to control your pain, including the most advanced medical and interventional options, like implantable neurostimulation devices. Our experts can perform many procedures right in our office, so you don’t have to stay overnight in the hospital. And because our pain experts are also active researchers, we're able to offer a range of clinical trials for innovative treatments that are not yet widely available.
• Relieving pain without opioids: At Rush, we take steps to limit the amount of opioid pain medication you take to lower the risk of addiction. In fact, Rush pain experts are nationally recognized for their efforts to combat the opioid epidemic by finding innovative alternatives to managing pain. We were among the first in the country to implant a spinal cord stimulator to control chronic pain, and we helped develop pain management strategies for surgeries and other treatments.
• Help adjusting to chronic pain or disability: The team at Rush includes experts in rehabilitation psychology. That means we can help you learn strategies for coping with chronic pain or disability — and living a fulfilling life. 
• Pain pump expertise. Our experts offer intrathecal pumps, also called "pain pumps," for failed back surgery, nerve pain or cancer, as well as to reduce spasticity associated with conditions like MS and cerebral palsy. The pump delivers low doses of pain-relieving medication, like baclofen or morphine, through a catheter directly to your spinal fluid. Since the drug is delivered in smaller doses than you would be taking orally, you typically experience fewer side effects. Our team will program the pump to deliver the medication at specific times of day or to release it slowly throughout the day. 
• Cool relief for knee arthritis: Pain medicine specialists at Rush helped develop a noninvasive treatment that can relieve pain if you have chronic knee, hip or back pain and aren't eligible for surgery. The COOLIEF procedure uses cooled radiofrequency energy to target and interrupt pain signals. COOLIEF offers longer-lasting pain relief than traditional radiofreqency ablation: up to a year for knee and hip pain, and up to two years for chronic back pain.