The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Though it has been frequented by patients since September, Thompson recently celebrated the official opening of the Thompson Pain Clinic. Located in the Thompson General Hospital, the clinic serves northern Manitobans and has so far welcomed about 500 patients. 'If anyone knows anyone or if anyone is going through chronic pain, I think people understand how important this is, first and foremost, to people's quality of life,' said Thompson MLA Steve Ashton at the June 21 opening, 'but also in many cases it's a key element of treatment of many of the underlying causes as well.' The clinic was established with $350,000 in provincial funding that was used to purchase specialized equipment for treating pain disorders. Dr. Chandran Baker and Dr. Howard Intrater work at the clinic four days a month, providing services such as image-guided injections to control pain from damaged nerves and joints. Equipment used at the clinic includes a C-arm X-ray machine, which enables doctors to get the best possible view of areas where pain is originating in order to administer medication. The clinic is part of the expansion of the Thompson General Hospital's Northern Consultation Clinic, which will include $2 million in future renovations to try to attract more visiting specialists to offer services in Thompson. Once the expansion project is underway, it is expected that it will reduce the annual number of patient trips from northern Manitoba to Winnipeg by nearly 1,000. Dr. Baker says the treatment provided at the pain clinic is not geared toward curing patients of their chronic pain, since those referred to it are the ones whose pain is most severe and who haven't responded to conventional treatment. 'What we want to do, whenever we see the patients and they come in, we say, 'You're always going to have chronic pain, but we don't want it to manage you, we don't want it to take over your life,'' Dr. Baker says. 'Because a lot of these patients, unfortunately, have such bad pain that they can't sleep, can't work, can't hold a job and so what we're trying to do is to make them more functional. We focus more on functionality because it's not a cure. We're not going to cure them.' _ Ian Graham, Thompson Citizen
