Featured in Hour Detroit Magazine Top Docs
The statistic is unsettling: More than a quarter of Americans age 20 and older — or 76.5 million people — experience chronic pain.
For sufferers, chronic musculoskeletal pain is a debilitating condition that impacts all aspects of daily living. And according to one study by the American Academy of Pain Management, 51 percent of individuals coping with pain believe there is no remedy for it.
Jeffrey Mendelson, M.D., an Hour Detroit Top Doc, has spent the last two decades treating conditions that lead to acute and chronic bone and joint pain. Every day, he and his colleagues at Mendelson Kornblum Orthopedic & Spine Specialists give hope and relief to their patients.
“Orthopedics is a rapidly changing field; it’s completely different from when my father founded this practice in 1963,” Mendelson says. (Both he and his two brothers, Stephen and David, are orthopedic surgeons like their father, Herbert.)
“Today there are more options than ever before to bring relief to patients, and many interventions are high-tech and minimally invasive,” he adds. “Our message to patients is both simple and profound: Whatever the cause of your pain, there is a solution. You can have your life back.”
Mendelson Kornblum has evolved from providing traditional orthopedic care to offering leading-edge, multidisciplinary surgical and noninvasive treatments such as joint replacement and resurfacing, spine and neck adjustment, epidural injections, spinal stimulators, outpatient physical therapy, pain management, and sports medicine.
Giuseppe Paese, D.O., also a Top Doc honoree, specializes in interventional pain management. He says his ability to collaborate with his colleagues helps patients achieve a more desirable outcome.
“Helping patients is often a step-by-step process; they may need to have a combination of treatments,” he says. “Here, if it’s needed, we can refer our patients to an orthopedic, spine, or pain management specialist within our own group, and we can work closely with their physical therapists.”
Dawn Evennou severely injured her back in an automobile accident and consulted several pain management physicians before finding Dr. Paese. After a spinal stimulator surgery through Mendelson Kornblum in 2010, and with Dr. Paese overseeing her care, Evennou is now pain-free.
“I was in so much pain, and I wondered if that would ever end,” says Evennou, who also underwent other surgeries. “I received the latest in treatment, and I’ve slowly been able to get back to some of the things I enjoyed doing before the accident. I was able to do some gardening this year, and I don’t have words to describe how good it felt.”
Mendelson Kornblum physicians make it a priority to learn about new procedures and techniques. This commitment to staying ahead of the curve benefited patient Sandy Stanis when she had Birmingham Hip Resurfacing. Jeffrey Mendelson completed special training to perform this procedure — an alternative to total hip replacement — after it was approved by the FDA.
“My recovery was quick and uneventful,” Stanis says. “I’m confident I received better care at Mendelson Kornblum than I would have anywhere else. Dr. Jeff and the whole staff treated me like a member of the family.”