DR. GURPREET SINGH PADDA, MD, MBA, MHP
He spent twenty years telling patients their numbers were not too bad.
He has said so publicly, in front of rooms full of colleagues. The correction is the reason this practice asks about your sleep and your bloodwork on a back pain visit, and it is a more useful thing to know about a physician than a list of boards.
Who is treating you
Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP is an interventional pain physician, anesthesiologist and addiction medicine specialist in St. Louis. He holds board certification across five fields — anesthesiology, pain medicine, interventional pain management, addiction medicine and obesity medicine — treats chronic pain as a metabolic disease, and has run the Center for Interventional Pain Management since 2001.
He was trained first in trauma surgery, then in anesthesiology, and spent seven years as an academic before leaving the assembly line. He is an operator with an MBA who runs the practice as a system rather than a series of appointments, and he funds a 501(c)(3) out of his own pocket. Those parts are not separate from the clinical work — the same eye that re-engineers a preadmission program is the one that noticed the food supply is an incentive problem before it is a nutrition problem.
The correction that shaped the practice
For roughly two decades he told pre-diabetic patients that an A1C drifting upward was not too bad, because that was the standard of the day and he believed it. He was also, for years, a strict vegetarian defending guidelines he now dismantles. Both models changed when the physiology stopped supporting them.
The relevance to your back is direct. If insulin resistance and chronic metabolic inflammation glycate collagen, impair the microcirculation that feeds a disc, and hold tissue in a degradative state, then a lumbar spine is a metabolic organ as much as a mechanical one — and the standard workup, which stops at the picture, is missing half the causal chain. A physician who has already been wrong about the terrain once is more careful about calling a back a mechanical problem and stopping there.
Pain is a signal, not a diagnosis. The disc is where it hurts. It is not why it hurts.
Dr. Padda, on how this practice reads a chart
Training
- University of Missouri–Kansas City — BA in Biology, then MD
- General surgery training at Cook County Hospital, University of Illinois–Chicago
- Anesthesia residency at Illinois Masonic
- Anesthesia residency, Washington University–Barnes, with pediatric anesthesia at St. Louis Children’s; Chief Resident 1991–92
- MBA in International Business Studies, Saint Louis University
- Certified Physician Executive, American College of Physician Executives
Board certification
- Anesthesiology
- Pain Medicine
- Interventional Pain Management — Diplomate, American Board of Interventional Pain Physicians
- Addiction Medicine
- Obesity Medicine
- Metabolic Health Practitioner, Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners
- Fellow of Interventional Pain Physicians
Added competency certifications in Coding, Compliance and Practice Management (2009), Controlled Substance Management (2010), Nutrition Network Advisor (2023) and Regenerative Medicine in Interventional Pain Management (2024). Licensed in Missouri and Illinois, among other states. Individual NPI 1427035955.
Academic and leadership
- Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology (1992–99) and of Pediatrics (1993–99), Cardinal Glennon / Saint Louis University
- Pediatric Anesthesiology, Associate Director, and founding Director of the Pediatric Acute Pain Management Service (1995–99)
- Saint Louis University Institutional Review Board — Deputy Director (1998–99)
- Faculty, KCU Freeman Health System psychiatry residency, pain and addiction (2024–present)
- Chairman of Anesthesia, Perioperative Medicine and Pain Management at Saint Joseph’s–Kirkwood and at Saint Alexius
- Center for Interventional Pain Management — Chief Medical Officer since 2001
- Center for Regenerative Medicine — Medical Director since 2004
- President, Missouri Society of Interventional Pain Physicians (2002–10, 2023–present)
- Board Member and Examiner, American Board of Interventional Pain Physicians; ASIPP Board of Directors
On the national platform
Two ASIPP keynotes carry the argument this practice is built on: Treating Metainflammation and Interventional Pain (July 2020) and Metabolic Inflammation and the Hedonic Treadmill (July 2021, New Orleans). More recently, Revenue Enhancement with Risk Reduction through Outcome Measurement (ASIPP 2025) and Reimagining Metabolic Health (SMHP / LowCarbUSA, January 2025).
His published research runs across anesthesiology, critical care, pain and surgical journals — among them Neuromodulation, Pain Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, Anesthesia & Analgesia, Dermatologic Surgery and Pain Physician. He reviews for PharmacoEconomics, and he coauthored Next Level Your Life in 2023.
Seva, and why a pain clinic mentions it
The word seva describes service given without expecting return, credit or exchange. That is the organizing ethic here, and it is the reason for structures that carry no revenue: the Sevadar Foundation, a 501(c)(3) currently self-funded, with three program arms — CareGuard, a federally listed Patient Safety Organization; Valor Medica, for veterans and neighbors experiencing homelessness; and IntellaRx, working on opioid safety. Medical missions to Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Board service with Exoneration Nation, Arise Veterans, U Gro and the March of Dimes.
It shows up in the clinic as a rule rather than as a sentiment: medicine is a duty owed, not a transaction executed. In practice that means we are obligated to fix what we can see, whether or not anyone is paying us to look at it — which is why the bloodwork gets ordered on a back pain visit even though nobody came in for it.
On opioids, stated plainly
This is harm reduction set against human frailty, not a rule applied to somebody the moment they walk in. Where pain is irreversible, zero is not the target. The target is the smallest exposure that works, with function held and damage kept off the table. Patients already on long-term therapy are helped to reduce it using interventional treatment that lowers the input the medication is covering, and kept out of withdrawal while that happens. Nobody is required to taper as a condition of being assessed.
21% / 34%
of patients on long-term opioid therapy are fully weaned within 90 days and within one year respectively, under interventional treatment. Across our established population, fewer than 1% remain above 90 MME per day. Practice-reported figures from our own population, not trial outcomes, and individual results vary.
He publishes the numbers rather than describing them
On International Overdose Awareness Day in August 2026 he released his practice’s own opioid data instead of a position statement. The average new patient arrives after more than two and a half years in pain and above 90 morphine milligram equivalents a day. Within 90 days of active interventional treatment 21% are completely off opioid pain medication, and within a year 34% are. Of those who cannot be fully weaned, the large majority are brought below 30 MME a day.
The argument attached to the numbers is the one this page has already made: a taper reduces a dose, while treating the structure generating the pain changes why the dose was there. Those are practice-reported figures from his own patient population, not trial outcomes, and individual results vary. Reported by AP News; the full release is here.
What that means for your appointment
Concretely: you will be examined rather than triaged, your imaging will be read against you rather than instead of you, a candidate pain generator will be named out loud, and the plan to test it will be explained before anything is done. Where the answer is that we are not the right people, you will be told that on the day.
BOARD CERTIFICATIONS, SOCIETIES AND AFFILIATIONS
Related reading
- What happens at the first visit
- Back pain doctor in St. Louis
- The diagnostic block, explained
- Sleep and back pain
- Connect with us
The credentials are the easy part to verify. The method is the part that matters.
Examine, name a structure, test it, treat what was confirmed. If you want that applied to your back, that is what this practice does.
12174 Natural Bridge Rd, Suite 301
St. Louis, MO 63044
At DePaul Hospital on Natural Bridge Road, inside the I-270 and I-70 interchange, on the west side of the airport.