Mayfair Diagnostics Opens New Southeast Location for Pain Therapy

The below is a blog submission by Calgary Chamber Member Mayfair Diagnostics.

We are pleased to announce the launch of image-guided pain therapy services at our Mayfair Diagnostics Mahogany Village location in Southeast Calgary, at 230, 3 Mahogany Row SE.

We have been accepting pain therapy bookings for this location for the past month, and will see our first patients on Monday, January 20, 2020. We have extended pain therapy to Mahogany in order to make it more convenient for our patients to get the pain management treatment they need – we will now have one pain therapy location in each quadrant of Calgary.

Mayfair Diagnostics has four locations that offer pain management services: Castleridge in the Northeast, Market Mall in the Northwest, Mayfair Place in the Southwest, and now Mahogany in the Southeast.

Mayfair Diagnostics Mahogany Village is located in the southeast corner of Mahogany Village Market, in the two-storey building behind the Sobeys. We are on the second floor, and the entrance to come upstairs is behind the building (on the east side) facing the parking lot.

The clinic is just 10 minutes from the South Health Campus hospital in Seton, and offers bone density, mammography, image-guided pain therapy, ultrasound, and X-ray services. The Mahogany pain therapy department will be performing treatments to help chronic pain by precisely injecting medication through a small needle, or performing treatment on soft tissues.

Pain therapy procedures are commonly used to treat pain in joints like ankles, elbows, hips, knees, spine, shoulders, thumbs, and wrists. You may benefit from injections if you have:

• Arthritis or persistent joint pain
• Soft tissue inflammation or pain
• Bakers cyst
• Joint or soft tissue injuries
• Nerve pain

How does pain therapy work?

Image-guided pain therapy procedures use X-ray or ultrasound imaging to direct an injection of medication into a precise location believed to be the cause for your pain. For example, a Cortisone injection introduces a steroid (an anti-inflammatory medication) into joints, or around tendons or bursa, to decrease inflammation, and reduce pain. Or a hyaluronic acid injection will introduce a gel-like substance to help lubricate the joint and treat pain and osteoarthritis in joints. These procedures allows a small dose of medication to be injected into a localized and specific area of concern while keeping potential side effects to a minimum.

For soft tissue therapies, a radiologist will use a small needle to remove calcium build up, or to gently poke a torn or inflamed tendon to stimulate healing. This process is also performed under image guidance. For a full listing of pain management procedures, please visit our services page.

Does it hurt?

There will be discomfort or very short-lived pain during the injection and when administering the local anesthetic. However, pain perception depends greatly on your pain threshold and the degree of inflammation of the area involved. Most patients find the pain tolerable. Mayfair’s expert team has extensive experience in performing these procedures and do our very best to make them as quick and painless as possible.

How do I book a pain therapy appointment?

Image-guided pain therapy procedures must be requested by a health-care practitioner. For muscle and soft tissue concerns, an ultrasound is usually requested first to determine the cause of symptoms, possibly in conjunction with an X-ray which can look at the bones and joint spaces near the area of concern.

Once the cause has been identified and treatment options reviewed, an image-guided pain therapy procedure may be recommended by us or requested by your practitioner. You will need a requisition from the physician or therapist. Once we have received the requisition we will then review it and contact you to confirm the area and type of injection requested, and to book the appointment.

Cortisone injections, tendon calcification and needling fenestration therapies are fully covered under the Alberta Health Care Insurance plan. Some of our pain therapy services include a cost for the medication (Botox, hyaluronic acid), which is charged at the manufacturer’s cost, or a cost for the entire treatment (platelet-rich plasma, prolotherapy injections).

For more information about specific procedures, please visit our services page.

REFERENCES

Arthritis Society & Dr. J. Hochman. (2017) “Osteoarthritis.” www.arthritis.ca. Accessed December 20, 2019.

Arthroscopy Association of Canada (2019) “Arthroscopy Association of Canada Position Statement on Intra-articular Injections for Knee Osteoarthritis.” Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine. 7 (7). Accessed December 20, 2019.

Mayo Clinic Staff (2019) “Cortisone shots.” www.mayoclinic.org. Accessed December 20, 2019.