If you're dealing with chronic back, neck, or joint pain, surgery isn't the only door left to walk through. The team at Integrity Pain & Wellness in Glendale spends most of its time on the option that comes before surgery: finding exactly what's causing the pain and treating that specific problem with an injection, a nerve procedure, or a regenerative treatment. Here's how that actually plays out at the Glendale office: who you'll see, what they'll ask for, and what the path from first appointment to relief tends to look like.
The Glendale office sits at 6677 W. Thunderbird Road, and it draws patients from all over the West Valley, Peoria, Surprise, Sun City, Avondale, Goodyear, and West Phoenix included. Most people who show up have already been through the usual first steps: physical therapy, ibuprofen, maybe a course of oral steroids from their family doctor. None of it stuck. What they're really after isn't another prescription; it's an answer for what's actually wrong.
That's the whole reason Integrity Pain & Wellness exists in the first place. According to the practice's about page, the mission comes down to compassionate, competent care for anyone in pain, built around actually listening to patients rather than rushing them through a visit. Clinically, that means using fluoroscopic and ultrasound guidance to find the source of the pain instead of just masking it and trying to keep patients off opioids in the process.
Most patients coming into the Glendale office fall into a handful of categories: back pain, neck pain, degenerative disc disease, neuropathy, arthritis, and headaches or migraines. You can read more about each of these on the practice's back pain, neck pain, degenerative disc disease, neuropathy, arthritis, and headache pages.
None of these show up the same way twice, though. Two people can both describe radiating leg pain and end up with completely different diagnoses once the workup is done. That's where electromyography (EMG) comes in; it's a nerve function test the Glendale team uses to figure out which nerve is actually involved before anyone talks about treatment.
Once your referral, records, and imaging are in hand, the physician isn't just picking a treatment off a menu; they're matching the procedure to the specific structure causing the pain, whether that's a disc, a joint, or a particular nerve. Here's roughly how the different options break down:
Injections. Epidural injections calm inflamed nerve roots along the spine. Cortisone shots handle inflammation in a joint or soft tissue. Diagnostic nerve blocks are used to confirm exactly which nerve is sending the pain signal before committing to a longer-term fix.
Nerve procedures. If a nerve block shows that a specific nerve is the culprit, radiofrequency ablation uses heat from radio waves to interrupt that nerve's signal for a longer stretch of relief than an injection alone. For pain that's proven stubborn even after other treatments, spinal cord stimulation is the next tier up.
Regenerative medicine. PRP therapy takes a different approach entirely , instead of quieting a pain signal, it uses a concentrated sample of your own blood platelets to try to actually heal damaged tissue, which is why it's often used for tendon injuries and osteoarthritis.
Ketamine infusion. Ketamine therapy is offered for chronic pain, PTSD, and depression, given in a controlled, low-dose infusion. Since Integrity Pain & Wellness is staffed by anesthesiology-trained physicians, this is close to their home turf; the same pharmacology and monitoring skills they use for sedation during procedures carry directly over to running a safe infusion.
Here's a quick reference for how these tend to line up with different types of pain:
|
Pain Type |
Typical First-Line Approach |
Related Service |
|
Herniated disc / radiating nerve pain |
Epidural injection |
|
|
Joint inflammation (knee, shoulder, hip) |
Cortisone shot or PRP |
|
|
Chronic facet or spine pain |
Radiofrequency ablation |
|
|
Pain that hasn't responded to other treatment |
Spinal cord stimulation |
|
|
Nerve damage, numbness, or tingling |
EMG, then targeted treatment |
|
|
Chronic pain with depression or PTSD overlap |
Ketamine infusion |
This is really the whole philosophy in one table: match the tool to the actual problem, and don't reach for the same procedure for every patient who walks in with back pain.
The Glendale team is bigger and more varied than most people expect from a single-office visit. Physicians include Amit M. Patel, M.D., Bogdan Anghel, M.D., Luke Garcia, D.O., David Parker, M.D., Karam Moon, M.D., and Ahmad Saab, MD, MPH, FAAFP. Rounding out the care team are nurse practitioners Tamara Fischer, FNP-C, Detra Harrison, FNP-C, Jenny Miller, FNP-C, Karelle Labrador, FNP-C, and Samir Hamel, FNP, along with CRNA Katherine Ford and licensed massage therapist Kenadie Rahn, LMT.
Having that many disciplines in one place, pain medicine, anesthesiology, physical medicine and rehab, and family medicine, means a patient's case can get more than one set of eyes on it, instead of being filtered through whatever one specialty happens to know best.
This is the part patients most often get tripped up on: Integrity Pain & Wellness can't confirm your appointment until the paperwork is in. Your referring provider needs to send over:
All of it needs to come attached to the referral straight from your primary care provider's office , the front desk literally can't put you on the schedule without it. If you're trying to get seen quickly, the fastest thing you can do is call your PCP's office and get that paperwork moving before you even call Integrity Pain & Wellness.
Assuming the paperwork's all been submitted, your first visit is mostly about figuring out what's going on before anyone talks about treatment. The physician goes through your imaging and treatment history, examines the area that's bothering you, and if there's still a question mark, may order an EMG to nail down which nerve is involved.
From there, the plan tends to follow the diagnosis pretty directly. Confirmed nerve root inflammation from a disc usually points toward an epidural injection. If a diagnostic nerve block already showed relief but the pain keeps returning, radiofrequency ablation is the logical next step, since it goes after the same nerve for a longer result. Tendon or joint damage without nerve involvement tends to point toward PRP therapy instead, since the goal there is healing the tissue rather than blocking a signal.
That's also the real reason the intake requirements exist. Without your prior records and imaging on hand, the physician is starting from scratch on something that may already have a documented history, and skipping that step usually just means a slower path to the right treatment.
Sometimes, yes. Certain spinal and joint conditions genuinely need it, and nothing about interventional pain management is meant to talk someone out of a surgery they actually need. But surgery is also irreversible and comes with a much longer recovery, so it makes sense to rule out the less invasive options first when the diagnosis allows for it. The physicians at Integrity Pain & Wellness train specifically in these interventional techniques, a different skill set from general surgery, built around treating the pain directly with imaging guidance rather than opening things up.
This is also why so much weight gets put on the diagnostic workup up front. An EMG that pinpoints a compressed nerve, or imaging that confirms which disc level is inflamed, lets the physician pick the least invasive procedure that will actually work, rather than guessing and working up the ladder one failed treatment at a time.
Pain treatment isn't always a one-and-done process, and the Glendale team plans for that from the start. A diagnostic nerve block, for example, is often just the first step; if it confirms which nerve is involved, that opens the door to a longer-lasting option like radiofrequency ablation. Similarly, PRP therapy tends to work in stages, since tissue healing takes time and a single injection isn't always the full course.
The follow-up visits matter just as much as the first one. That's where the physician checks how much relief you actually got, decides whether to repeat a procedure, step up to something more involved, or move in a different direction entirely. It's a fairly normal part of interventional pain care; treatments get adjusted based on how your body responds, not locked in after the first appointment.
Amit M. Patel, MD is the practice contact for Integrity Pain & Wellness, a multi-location Arizona practice focused on interventional pain management, chronic pain care, regenerative medicine, and physical medicine and rehabilitation. You can read more about the practice's mission and physician team on the Integrity Pain & Wellness About page.
