904-783-0008
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At Injury Care Centers, our team knows that pain can affect every part of your life. In our Jacksonville clinics, we work together, doctors, chiropractors, nurse practitioners, and rehabilitation specialists, to help you manage pain and restore your ability to do the things that matter most.
Our approach to pain management starts with careful listening and a thorough evaluation. We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, our team builds a plan around you, using hands-on treatments, rehabilitation, and graded exercise as the foundation. If more targeted interventions, such as injections, are needed, we make those decisions together based on what your exam shows.
We believe that managing pain is about more than just short-term relief; it’s about helping you get back to living fully. Our clinics are designed so that your medical care and hands-on therapy work seamlessly together, with open communication at every step.
If pain is holding you back, let our team help. Walk into any of our Jacksonville locations or call us at 904-783-0008 to find the nearest clinic and learn what to bring. We’re ready to support your recovery.
Pain relief is typically short-term. It focuses on easing how you feel in the moment, often with medication or physical methods, and doesn’t always address the underlying cause.
Pain management is a longer-term process that asks different questions: What’s causing this pain, what’s keeping it going, and what can we do, through treatment and activity changes, to make it better? The difference matters. When pain relief gets mistaken for a long-term plan, people can end up stuck in a cycle that never really solves the problem. What helps for an afternoon isn’t always a real solution.
Our team’s approach is stepwise, starting with conservative care. We begin with treatments that carry the lowest risk and work well for most injury-related pain. If those aren’t enough and your assessment points to a specific need, we then consider more targeted interventions.
Nothing in this process is automatic. Where your care begins, and how far it goes, depends on what we find during your exam and, if needed, your imaging.
To give you a better idea, here are the types of pain and injuries our team focuses on managing:
That last category is where people arrive feeling they’ve run out of options, often having been told the imaging looks fine. Imaging looking fine and pain being real are not in conflict, and a plan can be built either way. The full range of injuries across the practice is on our injury clinic page.
Many people come to us after feeling like they’ve run out of options, especially if their imaging results seem normal but the pain is still very real. We understand that you can have pain even when tests don’t show a clear problem, and we’ll work with you to create a plan either way. For a full list of injuries we treat, visit our injury clinic page.
How your pain acts often tells us more than how intense it is. Here are some patterns that guide our next steps:
Radiating pain. Pain that travels down your arm or leg, especially when accompanied by numbness, tingling, or weakness, usually points to nerve involvement, not just muscle, and means we may need to order imaging sooner.
Pain that’s worse at night or while resting. Most pain from movement or strain feels better when you rest. If your pain gets worse when you’re still, we take a closer look to find out why.
Pain that spreads. If pain starts in one spot and then moves to a wider area or the other side, it often means something has changed in how you’re moving, not that a new injury has appeared.
Pain that’s out of proportion. Severe pain from a light touch or an area that’s become extremely sensitive is a specific pattern with its own treatment plan. This isn’t something to ignore or push through.
Pain that stops improving. If you hit a plateau after making progress, it’s a signal for us to reassess. Usually, it means your plan needs to change, not just continue as is.
Your first appointment is an assessment, not a treatment session with an assessment attached. Expect about an hour. Your clinician takes the history of how the pain started and what it has done since, examines you properly, and records measurements that get repeated later so progress can be demonstrated instead of remembered.
The history covers what makes it better and worse, what you’ve stopped doing, how you’re sleeping, and what treatment you’ve already had and what happened with it. That last one matters more than people expect, because a treatment that half-worked tells us something. The physical examination measures instead of estimating: range of motion joint by joint, strength, reflexes, sensation, joint stability, and palpation to find which structures actually reproduce your symptoms. Reproducing the pain on a specific test is worth more than any description of it.
We also record function, not just pain. What you can lift, how long you can sit, how far you can walk, and what you’ve handed to somebody else are the measures that show whether a plan is working, and they’re more stable than a number out of ten.
Imaging follows a question. Digital X-ray is available in the practice, MRI is at our University Boulevard South location, and nerve studies are available where a nerve is the suspected problem.
Conservative care is the first rung, and for a large share of injury-related pain it’s also the last one needed.
Chiropractic care addresses joint restriction and the guarding patterns that build around a painful area. Physical therapy and physical medicine cover the strengthening and graded loading side. Spinal decompression is used for disc-related presentations at the affected level, and manual therapy, stretching, and mobility work address the soft-tissue restrictions that develop around a painful segment.
Supporting therapies are chosen against the presentation instead of applied as a package: photobiomodulation laser, shockwave and PiezoWave, TECAR, HEIT, electrical muscle stimulation, therapeutic ultrasound and PRP.
The active part matters more than any of the passive ones. Exercise, load progression, and the things you do between appointments do more of the long-term work than anything delivered in a treatment room, and a plan that never transfers responsibility back to you hasn’t finished.
Movement is also the thing people most reliably get wrong. Complete rest weakens the muscles that stabilize a painful area, so a back protected for a month is genuinely less able to tolerate load than it was. The fragility becomes real, having started as a description.
Interventional pain management means procedures that deliver treatment to a specific anatomical target, usually under imaging guidance, instead of treating an area as a whole. Injections are the most common form. It becomes a reasonable option when the examination points to a specific structure, conservative care has had a fair run without enough change, and the likely benefit is worth the risk of a procedure.
The target is the key part. These procedures are precise by design, so they depend on knowing what is generating the pain, and that’s exactly why the assessment and any imaging come first.
Some procedures are diagnostic as well as therapeutic. If treating a specific structure changes your symptoms, that tells us something about the source, and the information is useful whether or not the effect lasts.
Interventional pain management is part of the medical side of our practice, alongside injury evaluations and diagnostics such as MRI and nerve studies. Practically, that means it doesn’t require a referral out and a wait in the middle of a plan. Your clinician will explain what any specific procedure involves, what it’s aimed at, and what the alternatives are before anything is scheduled.
No outcome here is certain, and we won’t tell you otherwise. Responses vary; some people get a great deal from these procedures, and some get little, and a clinic that tells you in advance which of those you’ll be should be asked how it knows.
Prescribing is available in this practice, and it’s worth being straightforward about where medication does and doesn’t fit.
Medication is used in categories instead of as a single answer. Anti-inflammatories address the inflammatory component of an injury, muscle relaxants address protective spasm, and certain medications developed for other purposes are used specifically for nerve-related pain, because that pain responds differently.
Each category has a different role, a different risk profile, and a different sensible duration. None of them is a plan on its own, and none addresses why an area became painful in the first place.
There’s also a pattern worth knowing about, particularly with headache. Medication taken frequently over a long period can itself become part of what sustains the problem, which is one reason a plan gets reviewed instead of simply repeated.
What we won’t do on a web page is recommend a medication, name one, or suggest a dose. What’s appropriate depends on your examination, your history, what else you take, and what you’re trying to get back to, and that’s a conversation in a room and not a paragraph.
This is one of the most important ideas for anyone dealing with pain that’s lasted longer than the original injury, and it’s not often explained clearly.
Pain comes from your nervous system, not directly from injured tissues. Early on, this difference doesn’t matter much because pain usually matches the injury. But over time, the connection can change.
Over time, pain and injury can become disconnected. If your nervous system processes pain signals for months, it can get better at sending those signals, making normal movement feel painful even after the tissue has healed. This is a real process, not something imagined. It’s why scans can look normal even though pain is still limiting, and why “there’s nothing wrong on the scan” isn’t a complete answer.
This changes how we treat pain. If tissue is still healing, we focus on protecting the area and gradually increasing activity. If the tissue is healed but the nervous system is still sensitive, the goal is to rebuild your strength and confidence in movement, slowly expanding what you can do without triggering pain.
The truth is, steady and consistent activity over weeks makes more difference than any single treatment. Progress is measured by what you can do, not just how you feel on a given day.
Two questions come up in every pain assessment we do, and people are sometimes surprised by both.
The first is about sleep. Poor sleep lowers your pain tolerance and slows healing. The relationship goes both ways: pain disrupts sleep, and lack of sleep makes pain even harder to tolerate.
Ongoing pain often has a sleep issue beneath it. It’s best to talk about sleep early, because it’s often something we can help improve, and a plan built on poor sleep is at a disadvantage from the start. The second question is about stress. While stress doesn’t cause injury, it does affect muscle tension, breathing, and how much we notice pain, all of which can add to what you feel.
We ask about sleep and stress because they can be changed, not to suggest your pain is “just in your head.” If either plays a role, we’ll be clear about it and include it in your treatment plan.
Pain alone isn’t a good measure of progress, so we track several other things too.
Function comes first: what you can lift, how long you can sit or walk, and how much you can do at work before pain takes over. These abilities often improve before pain scores do, and they’re a more reliable sign of progress.
Next are range of motion and strength. We measure these at your first visit and track them over time, turning a vague sense of progress into something concrete.
We also look at frequency, which is especially important in persistent pain. If your bad days drop from five a week to two, even if they feel just as intense, you’ve made real progress.
Sleep is another key marker, and it’s often the first thing to improve. Better sleep usually happens before pain improves, so it’s an early sign that your plan is working.
We watch for plateaus; when progress stalls for two or three weeks, it tells us it’s time to adjust your plan or look for other factors, rather than just hoping things will change.
Some presentations need emergency assessment instead of a pain management appointment.
Call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room for chest pain, trouble breathing, sudden severe headache unlike your usual pattern, loss of consciousness, confusion, loss of bladder or bowel control, numbness in the groin or inner thighs, rapidly progressing weakness in an arm or leg, or severe pain with fever.
Pain that has changed character suddenly and dramatically, rather than gradually, also needs urgent assessment.
For serious injuries across northeast Florida, go to UF Health Jacksonville, the region’s Level I trauma center.
It depends on how you were hurt. After a car accident in Florida, your own auto insurance covers medical care as long as you’re seen within 14 days. For a work injury, workers’ compensation usually applies and has its own rules about which doctor you see. For pain that built up over time, health insurance is the normal route.
Under Florida’s no-fault law, auto insurance medical benefits are available only where you receive initial services and care within 14 days of the accident.
We see patients with or without insurance. If you don’t have coverage, call 904-783-0008 and ask about our Affordable Plans.
Pain management means attending repeatedly over a period, so this matters more than it does for a one-off visit.
| Area | Address | Weekday hours |
|---|---|---|
| Oakleaf, Argyle, Chimney Lakes | 9680 Argyle Forest Blvd, Suite 20 | 8:00 am to 7:00 pm |
| Southside | 9191 RG Skinner Pkwy, Suite 201 | 8:00 am to 7:00 pm |
| University, MRI on site | 4004 University Blvd S | 8:00 am to 7:00 pm |
| Westside, Murray Hill | 5222 Lenox Ave | 8:30 am to 6:30 pm |
| Mandarin | 3560 Cardinal Point Dr, Suite 101 | 8:30 am to 6:00 pm |
| Oceanway, Northside | 13453 North Main St N, Suite 501 | 8:00 am to 7:00 pm |
We also have a clinic at Jacksonville Beach, on 16th Avenue North.
Somebody living off 103rd Street or out toward Chimney Lakes has a very different commute to Argyle Forest Boulevard than to the Southside. Over the course of care, that difference is the thing most likely to interrupt a plan.
No appointment needed on weekdays, and telemedicine covers the review conversations where a physical examination isn’t the point of the visit, which keeps a plan going when getting across town is the obstacle.
No, you can be seen directly at our Jacksonville clinics. A referral requirement applies to follow-up care under Florida auto insurance, which your clinician will explain if it’s relevant to you.
No, assessment comes first, and conservative care is the starting point for most injury-related pain.
Procedures that deliver treatment to a specific anatomical target, usually under imaging guidance. Injections are the most common form.
It depends on the findings and how you respond. Progress is tracked against the measurements taken at your first visit rather than a fixed schedule.
Yes, normal imaging and real pain are not in conflict, and an assessment can identify a mechanical or nerve-related source that imaging doesn’t show.
Yes, pain management here is intended to sit alongside your existing care instead of replacing it.
Yes, we see patients with or without insurance. Call 904-783-0008 and ask about our Affordable Plans.
Our practice has treated injuries and nothing else since 2010, and pain management here is aimed at pain that came from an injury rather than at pain in general.
The structural advantage is that the whole ladder sits in one practice. Injury Care Centers has chiropractic physicians, physical medicine, rehabilitation, on-site imaging, and a medical doctor who can prescribe and deliver interventional procedures, so moving up or down a rung is a conversation instead of a referral and a wait.
The part we’d ask you to hold us to is that a plan gets reviewed instead of repeated. Your first-visit measurements get taken again, and if they aren’t moving by the point they should be, the honest response is to change the approach or investigate further. Come in at any Jacksonville clinic on a weekday, call 904-783-0008 to ask something first, or find addresses and hours for all our Jacksonville locations.
Last reviewed: August 2026
Medically reviewed by Dr. James Gilas, MD, Florida license no. ME92179
This page is general information and not a substitute for an exam by a clinician. If you have emergency symptoms, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.
Florida law described here is general information, not legal advice. Deadlines and rights depend on your situation, and a lawyer is the right person to advise you on a claim.
