PAIN MANAGEMENT

Living with chronic pain can be an isolating and invalidating experience from family, friends, and even doctors. Pain medications are limited in long-term effectiveness, and can cause addiction or other adverse consequences to your health or daily functioning.  Pain not only affects sleep, but also many other facets of being, including your mood, relationships, and thinking or behavior patterns.  It heightens stress and can also exacerbate or perpetuate pain, or weaken the ability to manage pain effectively.  This is true even for individuals who do not feel “stressed,” as stress can take on many forms that are below conscious, everyday awareness.

When pain is impacting the management of a primary sleep disorder, Dr. LaMarca is able to provide non-drug, behavioral and supportive interventions to make pain more manageable, ease suffering, and improve sleep quality.  Knowledgeable in the current research on chronic pain disorders, she teaches specific strategies to interrupt the negative cycle between pain and stress, reduce vulnerability to pain episodes, and learn more adaptive ways of relating to pain.  These skills can be applied to a wide range of conditions, including low back pain, tension headache, migraine, fibromyalgia, neck pain, arthritic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, or temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMD/TMJ), to name a few.

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Dr. LaMarca will gladly collaborate with your primary care doctor, pain specialist, or other providers to create a more comprehensive and integrated treatment plan.