Western Oklahoma Pain Specialists are located at their new office on North Main in Elk City. Founding doctor, Brian Blick, M.D., is a Board-Certified Anesthesiologist, Fellowship trained in Interventional Pain Management. He and his other partners, David Sharrah, M.D., Terrell Phllips, D.O., and Luke Mosel, D.O. perform several procedures to help individuals eliminate their pain or achieve a higher quality of life after severe injuries.
When thinking about the opioid epidemic, one of the first things that may come to mind is prescription drugs and the abuse of them. Dr. Blick explained his practice and what their pain management clinic entails, along with other options besides oral medicines and their possible abuse.
Included in their repertoire of specialties, besides intrathecal opioid trials, and opiate and non-opiate medical management, are kyphoplasty, interlaminar (cervical/thoracic/ lumbar) epidural, transforaminal (cervical/ thoracic/lumbar) epidural, steroid injections, sympathetic blocks (stellate, ganglion, thoracic, and lumbar), trigger point injections, intra-articular (hip/knee/shoulder) injections, facet joint injections, medial branch blocks, diagnostic nerve blocks, radiofrequency thermocoagulation (cervical/thoracic/lumbar), sacroiliac joint injections, and peripheral nerve blocks. Surgical interventions include spinal cord stimulation, peripheral nerve stimulation, sacroiliac joint fusion, interspinous implants, intrathecal pumps, and minimally invasive lumbar decompression.
“In terms of our practice, we are really big on minimizing and eliminating opioids that people need, unfortunately under some circumstances, it’s a necessary evil. We see a lot of sick patients that have had polytrauma from awful car accidents. People who have endured multiple back surgeries with multilevel hardware. Some people need it to be able to function,” Blick explained.
He continued to say that they have transitioned many of their patients from oral opioids to intrathecal opioids. This means they use a pain pump that is surgically implanted. It infuses low doses of narcotics into the spine.
“The pump is a better option for a lot of people because they then don’t have to get the systemic side effects of oral opioids,” Blick continued.
Pain medicine is a part of their specialty, which puts him in a difficult position because sometimes procedures do not work, and other more invasive options are not available for various reasons.
“Oral opioids are a part of our specialty, we don’t like it but unfortunately, sometimes surgeries don’t work either. That is the only thing we’re left at times,’ he said.
They may try stimulators and many of the other specialized options to keep the patient out of pain, but to allow him/her some sort of quality of life, the choices narrow. When a patient comes into the office there is a screening process, and the patient must agree to the terms of compliance with their monitoring regulations of the office and the law.
“The law is that we only have to see the patient every 90 days, but we see everybody every 28 days,” Blick said. “There is a tremendous amount of attention to detail that goes into running a practice like this.”
The majority of their patients are interventional patients, and only a small portion of them use medicine for pain management. This is because the doctors do not try to focus on the medicine management side, but they try to focus on interventions that could facilitate long term relief.
“We are all physicians who are fellowship trained. As interventionalists, we try to manage everything with interventional procedures and minimize opioids. We only use them when absolutely necessary,” Blick said.
Dr. Blick was raised in Edmond most of his life, and attended the University of Oklahoma, achieving a Bachelor of Business Administration degree. He then attended the University of Central Oklahoma and began his pursuit of a medical degree. He attended Ross University School of Medicine where he graduated in 2013 and completed his residency in Anesthesiology at the University of Kansas in 2017. After which he and his wife, Lauren, moved to Elk City and founded his current clinic. Dr. Blick recently completed an ACGME-accredited Interventional Spine and Pain Fellowship at LSU Medical Center in 2022. Although he did not need to have this additional degree to practice pain medicine, he wanted to have the highest level of training possible to better serve his Western Oklahoma patients.
“The reason I like pain medicine is because it’s great to try and end peoples’ suffering. It is also great to improve peoples’ quality of life. Pain medicine is very procedural based, and I love that aspect of it. We do a ton of procedures, and we get to do surgeries. In other subspecialties of anesthesiology, you really don’t get to scrub in and perform surgery. Plus, the technology and the innovation that’s going on in this field is unbelievable, especially in the past ten years. There’s no telling what kind of therapies they’ll have or that we’ll be able to provide to patients. So it is amazing specialty to be a part of,” Blick concluded.
