Joann Pung

A lot of physical therapists hesitate to specialize in chronic pain because it is particularly challenging to analyze and treat. In fact, most will tell you right at the beginning that chronic pain will never subside.

My job, however, is to prove them wrong. For 30 years I have treated people who have suffered years of pain.

I opened this clinic after personally struggling with chronic pain in both of my shoulders. I woke up one day with twinges of pain, despite not having any history of physical trauma. This experience is common when you reach the age of 40 or 50. Two years after the pain began, I realized that I had been suffering for so long that I had lost nearly all mobility in my shoulders. It was painful to drive and work, and I considered leaving my job for good due to the severity of the discomfort. I couldn’t even wash my hair without bending my head down to avoid lifting my arms!

Even as a physical therapist, instead of addressing the pain immediately, I allowed the pain to worsen, which is exactly what I told all my patients not to do.

That was when I understood that pain alone won’t convince people to seek help. We will usually learn to tolerate or ignore it. But there comes a time when the pain becomes so unbearable that we have no choice but to give up the activities we love. It is only then that we decide the problem is serious enough to seek treatment for it. By that time, multiple dysfunctions throughout the body have already developed due to compensatory habits we form to avoid the pain. This means that treating the painful area alone is no longer enough to solve the problem.

Fortunately for me, I am a PT. So, I thought, “No big deal, I can do this myself.” I was so confident that I could solve my problem but was disappointed to find that I could only feel about 75% better no matter what I tried. I had only 2 choices left: Go to a doctor who would order me an MRI or figure it out myself by going back to the basic foundation of physical therapy – kinesiology, the study of body movements, performance, and function by applying the sciences of body mechanics, anatomy, physiology, psychology, and neuroscience.

I chose the latter, and it was the best decision I ever made. I underwent a full recovery, and in the process, I developed a better and deeper understanding of how to assess and treat chronic pain. The focus of treatment isn’t simply the area that hurts. Instead, the course of treatment is defined by the root cause of that discomfort, which is often located in different parts of the body. Chronic pain treatment is special. The pain has been tolerated for so long that the body must be treated as a whole for any therapy to have a beneficial, lasting impact. That is why I am confident that I can help those suffering from years and years of chronic pain, even when nothing seems to work – confident enough to open up my own practice in July of 2016.

From the very beginning I have focused on getting results and transforming the lives of people who have lost all hope in their recovery. Almost entirely through word of mouth, our practice has grown so much that there are now three of us specialists trained in manual therapy here at our clinic. Each of us takes pride in the fact that unlike other treatments, manual therapy is all about consistent, personalized, one-on- one, and precise treatment. Our philosophy has always been and will always be “People first, Patient second,” as we continue welcoming new people into our family and change their lives for the better.