Behavioral medicine services offered at Pain Consultants of East Tennessee are provided by Behavioral Medicine Institute, p.c., a private practice group of psychologists and licensed clinical social workers who specialize in helping people with health-related problems. In 2000, Behavioral Medicine Institute, P.C. (BMI) opened an office inside of Pain Consultants of East Tennessee to make it easier for patients to get behavioral medicine services and to work closely with their medical specialists. It is a unique arrangement that gives patients a multi-disciplinary treatment approach to their pain.

“Behavioral medicine” is a name for psychology and psychotherapy services offered to people with health issues such as chronic pain. People are not referred for behavioral medicine because their physician thinks that their pain is “not real” or “all in their head.” Behavioral medicine helps people deal with their chronic pain.

We offer practical ways to help people reduce their pain, to better cope with their pain, and to prevent their pain from overwhelming them. We also help the physicians and practitioners at Pain Consultants of East Tennessee to assess and understand their patients so they can help them more effectively. Specifically, we conduct “risk assessment” on patients before any opiate (i.e., “narcotic”) pain medication is prescribed. This assessment does not say who can have prescriptions for opiates and who can’t– rather, a risk assessment helps the Pain Consultants clinicians know where to start with pain medication management and makes monitoring recommendations. Actually, our BMI psychologists are nationally recognized for their risk assessment services and have published multiple times on the topic. Beyond risk assessments, psychologists at Pain Consultants of East Tennessee assess pain patients’ psychological needs and how patients are coping, to better formulate the medical pain treatment and see what services might best help.

Most medical problems are best treated with some combination of interventional treatments (such as surgeries and injections), pharmacological treatments (medications), and changes patients can make for themselves (self-management techniques). Our psychologists specialize in the treatment chronic pain and teach a variety of self-management techniques so that patients have less distress about their pain. We have a single session pain coping session called “Empowered Relief®.” We are the only pain clinic in Tennessee to offer this nationally recognized program which has been empirically demonstrated to help pain patients. In a single two-hour session, we give people the tools they need to effectively reduce distress and sometimes reduce their pain. In addition, we use cutting edge technologies like biofeedback and virtual reality to help people learn to relax their body and to cope with pain.

For patients who are having difficulty coping with their pain, we also offer short-term counselling. We also can sometimes help patients with general life issues that come up during treatment, such as grief/loss issues and marital problems. While we do not have the time to offer long-term services to PCET patients, we can offer some limited help in a more convenient way than a patient trying to find another mental health professional at another practice.

The BMI psychologists who work with Pain Consultants of East Tennessee strive to offer excellent assessment and cost-effective treatment services as a part of a comprehensive PCET pain treatment package. This collaboration allows Pain Consultants of East Tennessee to offer more diverse treatment options for dealing with choric pain than any other practices in the area, if not the nation. We are proud of the program we have developed and welcome you to try it out for yourself or your loved one.