After a serious auto accident in July, 2011, Monmouth Pain’s Dr. Thomas Dandrea was unable to treat patients for several months. This week marks a successful recovery and return to his true passion—helping patients through Chiropractic. As a medical, chiropractic, physical therapy, and acupuncture office, what we’re doing here at Monmouth Pain is different from traditional pain management offices—providing serious pain relief without surgery or excessive painkillers.
For those of you who’ve been waiting to see Dr. Dandrea in the intervening months, we’d like to invite you now to return to our office. For new patients, come discover the difference at Monmouth Pain. Kindly give us a call at 732.345.1377 before coming by.
In Dr. Dandrea’s words:
Since I began Monmouth Pain nearly 15 years ago, I’ve treated literally thousands of patients. If you were any one of them, you know that I was just as enthusiastic to treat the thousandth patient as I was the very first.
When something is your true passion, generating that type of motivation and excitement isn’t difficult. And when you mean what you’re doing, the results are often dramatic.
Last summer, I was involved in an auto accident in Red Bank that has kept me from practicing as a chiropractor in our Red Bank office. An SUV drove over my foot, breaking the lower part of my leg and causing a compression fracture in one of my lumbar (lower back) vertebrae while giving me a significant concussion.
I’m an active person—anyone who is a patient in our office knows that I’m constantly moving, always working to give everything to our practice and to my family. When the accident first happened, I thought I could push through and keeping moving at the same pace. I thought I could keep going as I had before—and I was wrong.
In particular, having a concussion meant that I often felt dizzy and experienced vertigo. Of all of my injuries, these symptoms are what finally brought me to a place where I had to admit that something serious had happened to me, that I had to stop and allow myself to recover. Otherwise, I would be of no use to anyone, including both my family and our patients.
If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that we need to take the time to let our bodies heal after a trauma. If you’re in pain, don’t let mental blocks stop you from getting help. Denial is counterproductive and waiting to seek help only makes things worse.
I took the time I really needed to recover. A major downside was that I was unable to treat patients during this time. I missed the time I spent with our patients, missed that sense of privilege I always feel when a patient invites me to listen to their concerns and trusts me to find solutions for their painful problems.
The good news? My symptoms have dissipated and I’ve been given the green light to return to light duty at Monmouth Pain. While I’ve left my patients in the more-than-capable hands of our team of chiropractors here, I honestly can’t wait to get back on the treatment floor again.
This week, I’m getting that first-day of school feeling again. Even better, I’m not really the same person I was six months ago. An experience like this changes you forever. In this case, the injury was particularly and ironically relevant to my job as the director of rehabilitation at Monmouth Pain.
The foundation of Monmouth Pain’s core values was built on principles rooted in Chiropractic care. What does this mean? It means that today we are a medical pain management center that doesn’t give out pain pills like candy. It means that we’re 100% and enthusiastically committed to correcting what’s causing your pain without inflicting additional damage to the body. We want you to leave our office without pain and in better health than when you first came. This is an important distinction between us and other medical practices.
That seems intuitive, doesn’t it? And yet so much medical care is centered on pain pills and/or traumatic surgeries. Let’s take a thoughtful route to get you where you want to go. Well-planned pain management and rehabilitation is the key to this objective. Your body’s structure is a major influence in how well it will function as well as in its ability to heal.
We want to focus on your body’s ability to heal, rather than relying on surgery to offer a traumatic quick fix. Maybe you’re in too much pain for physical therapy or chiropractic care. Okay, let’s try something different. Epidural Steroid Injections, which are performed right here in our Monmouth County office, have provided plenty of back pain/sciatica/disc injury patients with localized pain relief. Localized pain relief accomplishes two really major goals:
- Allows patients to avoid damaging the body with painkilling medications.
- Helps suffering patients stay away from the operating table by making physical therapy and chiropractic recovery possible.
We offer a number of interventional procedures aside from Epidurals. We also provide Viscosupplementation for knee pain.
The spirit of commitment to providing the very best pain management is how Monmouth Pain initially went from being a one-room chiropractic office to a cutting-edge facility complete with medical doctors, a full physical therapy department, a team of the very best chiropractors in Monmouth County, and acupuncturists.
I’ve been really thrilled to see that so many of my patients have reached out with concern for my condition. It’s also been awesome to see such a large number come in looking for treatment with me.
It’s time to come back and find out what hasn’t changed since the accident—that my hands are still working, that my passion for helping others has grown only stronger, and that I’m looking forward to sitting down with each and every patient and listening to their concerns.
I can’t wait to start seeing both new and returning patients in the upcoming days, weeks, and months. I’m grateful for your patience and hope that we’ll be seeing each other soon.
Feel free to contact us here to set up your appointment.
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