Headache & Pain Center offers locals relief

For those who would prefer to avoid surgery to ease neck, lower back and feet pain, there is an alternative: the Headache & Pain Center.

Dr. Jimmy N. Ponder Jr., an anesthesiologist by training, went back to a Kansas City medical school to obtain additional training as an intervention pain specialist in the early 1990s in order to offer Tri-parish residents suffering with lower back and neck pains alternatives to going under the knife.

Ponder came back in 1994 and practiced interventional pain management out of a Franklin hospital for several years before realizing there was a market for him to start his own practice.

“After moving back, I realized that the specialty was underserved in our area,” he said. “There was no one practicing pain management or interventional pain management in this area. That’s when I started thinking about building a practice.”

Since then, Ponder has opened two interventional pain management clinics, one in Gray and another in New Iberia. The Gray facility was completed in October 1998, and Ponder added on to it in 2006. The New Iberia facility was finished in May 2008.

In early 2000, Ponder realized that he needed help maintaining his increasing patient load. Much like other specialties, there are physician recruiters who work with facilities and find them the best doctor that will be an asset to their practice or hospital.

Ponder’s recruiters helped him find Dr. Adolfo Cuadra, who was doing his training in interventional pain management in New Mexico, in 2000.

“He came down and saw what we were doing here,” Ponder said. “He liked how we did business. It made sense to offer him a position here at the Headache & Pain Center.”

Cuadra came aboard in 2001

Dr. Brandon Brooks is a pharmacist turned intervention pain management specialist. Ponder became aware of Brooks through one of his nurses whose husband was also a pharmacist.

In the early 2000s, Ponder and Brooks met. Ponder didn’t offer Brooks a job at that time because he still had six years of medical school left. Upon graduation, Brooks joined the practice in 2007.

“These guys are from two different backgrounds, but together we work well,” Ponder said. “We have a solid practice and we know how to tailor our treatments to fit each patient.”

Though the doctors are certified and qualified, interventional pain management is still a relatively new specialty.

“What we do in our specialty is use non-surgical means to relieve people’s pain,” Ponder said. “We also use non-narcotic medication to try and relieve pain. We are kind of in between a surgeon who would operate on someone and a physician who just might prescribe medications for a painful condition.”

The three Headache & Pain Center doctors treat the head and the heels, and everything in between.

“We do therapeutic injections where we try to inject numbing medication and healing medication around painful areas,” Ponder said. “We freeze nerves, we heat nerves. We stimulate nerves. We splint and brace joints to try and get things to heal. We use electrical stimulation devices called TENS units, and sometimes physical therapy.”

Ponder said most of the pain syndromes that are treated at the clinic include lower back and neck pains.

With low back pains, Ponder said patients tend to suffer from herniated discs, degenerative disc disease, spinal stenosis, and arthritis of the spine or spurs on spine.

“Those are the typical type of low back pains,” he said. “They can cause pain just in the lower back or pain where it radiates down the leg, commonly called sciatica.”

The neck is the second most common area Ponder treats. “Sometimes neck pain can be associated with a headache,” Ponder said. “Or the pain from the neck can actually radiate into the arm causing a similar condition to sciatica, where the patients get numbness, tingling or maybe even weakness in the arm.”

Some of the other common treatable pains are shingles, a painful rash that is caused by the chickenpox virus, headaches including migraines, tension headaches that originate from the neck and go into the head, and cluster type headaches; arthritis of the different kinds of joints, tendinitis, bursitis of the different joints and plantar fasciitis or heel spurs.

“Our philosophy is to use the non-narcotic method to treat pain,” Ponder said. “Giving patients medication that is not addictive in combination with what we have learned how to do as anesthesiologists and pain physicians. We try to take a surgical condition and treat it non-surgically.”

Dr. Jimmy Ponder Jr., owner of the Headache & Pain Center in Gray, and his team of physicians offers patients surgical alternatives to the most common pain syndromes that occur in the lower back, neck, legs and feet. * Photo by SOPHIA RUFFIN