Chronic Pain Management in Greenville, SC
Chronic Pain Management in Greenville, SC. Root-cause acupuncture + functional medicine. Dr. Hendry, DAOM, NCBAHM-certified. Call (864) 365-6156.
"Having Cancer and the side effects of the Medicine has made it difficult with the Joint Pain. However by receiving the treatments it has made my outlook and pain tolerable with the help of Dr. Hendry. Highly recommend this practice."
— Margie Halley · April 2015 · Google Review
I spent three years in the Prisma Health Emergency Department studying needle-based alternatives to opioids for acute pain — and published five papers from that work. That research context is exactly how I approach chronic pain: as a clinical scientist who needs to identify the neurological mechanism and match the treatment to it. Chronic pain is not acute pain that has lasted longer. It involves central sensitization, HPA axis dysregulation, and neuroplastic reorganization that require fundamentally different interventions than the original injury.
How Chronic Pain Management Works
Chronic pain management at IHP involves a multi-dimensional assessment: identifying the primary pain mechanism (nociceptive, neuropathic, central sensitization, or mixed), evaluating systemic inflammatory load, assessing nutritional and hormonal contributors, and mapping the Chinese medicine pattern of pain. Treatment protocol is built around the primary pain driver, integrating the most effective tools from IHP's full therapeutic toolkit.
Conditions Treated with Chronic Pain Management
Integrative Chronic Pain Management vs. Procedure-Focused Pain Management Clinics
Conventional pain management clinics provide essential services for complex chronic pain patients, including interventional procedures such as spinal cord stimulation, nerve blocks, and intrathecal drug delivery. These technologies address the neurological signaling pathway at specific anatomical points and are appropriate for carefully selected patients with refractory pain. The structural limitation of a procedure-focused model is that it primarily addresses signal transmission without consistently modifying the central sensitization, HPA dysregulation, myofascial drivers, or systemic inflammatory factors that sustain chronic pain. Vickers et al. (J Pain, 2018) demonstrated that acupuncture, a non-interventional neurological treatment, produces one-year pain reduction comparable in magnitude to many interventional procedures, through mechanisms including descending inhibitory pathway activation and endogenous opioid release. Our comprehensive chronic pain framework layers acupuncture for central sensitization with dry needling for peripheral myofascial drivers, functional medicine for systemic contributors including metabolic inflammation and sleep dysregulation, and Chinese herbal medicine for constitutional support. This is not a rejection of interventional pain medicine; it is a parallel system that addresses the dimensions of chronic pain that procedures do not reach, and often reduces the interventional burden required.
Research & Evidence
Chronic pain affecting more than 12 weeks involves a fundamental neuroplastic reorganization of pain processing that distinguishes it from acute nociception. Central sensitization, characterized by long-term potentiation of synaptic connections in the dorsal horn and thalamo-cortical pain circuits, results in allodynia, hyperalgesia, and pain that persists beyond tissue healing. HPA axis dysregulation, the neurobiological stress response system, amplifies central sensitization through cortisol and corticotropin-releasing hormone effects on neuroinflammation. Dr. Hendry's three-year clinical study at Prisma Health directly addressed the need for non-opioid pain management approaches that engage these neurological mechanisms, producing five peer-reviewed publications with 52 citations. Vickers AJ et al. (J Pain, 2018) provided the definitive evidence base demonstrating that acupuncture produces effects on chronic pain that are not only statistically significant but clinically meaningful at one year. Our chronic pain management framework identifies the specific neurological, structural, and systemic drivers in each patient and deploys targeted interventions for each.
Your First Appointment
Bring a comprehensive pain history: onset, character, location, severity (VAS scale), functional limitations, prior treatments, and current medications. Dr. Hendry uses a structured pain assessment that captures all dimensions of chronic pain for accurate treatment planning.
Why Dr. Hendry for Chronic Pain Management
Dr. Hendry's Prisma Health opioid alternative research is the most direct qualification for chronic pain management in integrative medicine. His published research on needle-based alternatives to opioids demonstrates his ability to apply needling techniques at a medically rigorous standard for serious pain conditions.