Dave Bucher had given up.

A mason by trade, his physical job laying bricks and heavy concrete blocks involved a lot of lifting and twisting movements, leading to back problems and unrelenting pain. He underwent half a dozen surgeries and procedures and took medication, but the agony he felt often drove him to bed. He was having trouble working and even turned to alcohol to numb the stabbing discomfort that ruled his days.

“I was at the point where I didn’t know what to do anymore,” he says. “I was tired of surgeries, tired of opiates. I was grumpy and fussy. People just started leaving me alone. They didn’t want to poke a monster.”

Then he heard about WellSpan’s Restorative Pain Program. The one-year program offers a multi-disciplinary, intensive, body-mind approach. Patients receive physical therapy, pain intervention services and medication, acupuncture, yoga, nutritional counseling and massage therapy. They learn how to meditate and also receive training in how to use their mind to help lessen the pain and improve their function.

“I saw it as a sign that the Lord is trying to show me something here,” he says.

Feeling he had nothing more left to lose, Dave signed up for the program.

“A blissful transformation” is how he describes his journey. His pain is not gone but he now knows how to manage it and live his life fully. Two years ago, he was using a cane. Now he’s working on setting up a woodworking shop at his home in northern Lancaster County.

“This program is a godsend in my eyes,” he says.

Dave Bucher in his woodshop.

A new approach to chronic pain

Chronic pain – pain that lasts more than three months – is a common health condition, impacting about 116 million people in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health. Its impact is huge, costing about $635 billion in medical costs including lost productivity every year.

WellSpan wanted to find a better way to help their patients suffering from chronic pain from a variety of causes: muscular conditions, accidents, fibromyalgia or other issues. These patients often have tried a wide variety of therapies, including surgery. They want and need an effective and safe way to treat their pain.

Begun in 2023, the program offers a comprehensive approach that includes clinical care from a physical medicine and rehab physician and a physical therapist, body work that includes acupuncture and massage therapy, and training the mind to help decrease pain signals.

“The program works to improve patients’ function and their ability to decrease the effect of pain on their lives,” says Dr. Ben Roitberg, WellSpan chief medical officer of neurosciences. “They learn how to relieve and manage pain. The goal is that pain no longer defines their lives.”

How it works

During the first month of the program, patients attend weekly sessions that feature classes and therapy, with the sessions decreasing in frequency over time. The purpose of the intense schedule is to help patients form new habits, a process that takes about four months.

Patients may meet with as many as five specialists in a single visit, a team that focuses on their unique history with pain and their individual needs as they progress through the program. The specialists understand the challenges these patients are facing. They know that pain doesn’t just hurt – it changes the way people live, their routines, their workday and their relationships with others.

Ultimately, they want to help them to interrupt the cycle of pain.

“Chronic pain is learned pain,” says Dr. Sergey Borodianski, a physical medicine rehabilitation specialist and lead physician of the program. “This pain is as real as the pain you feel when you are first injured. But the nervous system has memorized its response to the injury and repeats that response long after the injury has healed.”

That’s why the program addresses body and mind with a specific treatment called Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), which helps train the nervous system to reinterpret the signals it is misreading.

“It rewires your nervous system and helps you ‘unlearn’ chronic pain,” Dr. Borodianski says.

Research backs this up. A 2021 study showed that 66% of patients with chronic back pain were pain-free or nearly pain-free after PRT, compared to 10% who received standard care.

How it worked for Dave

Dave says the program’s classes taught him about how the body processes pain and how different internal signals can influence it. He learned about the role of the mind in pain.

He learned how to stretch and lift properly. He also got to try new therapies: acupuncture and massage therapy were particularly helpful, he found. And Dr. Borodianski took a new approach to injections, which previously had not been effective for Dave, probing to find the precise pain points and injecting the medicine in those exact spots. Dave felt almost immediate results.

Dave describes his “blissful transformation” this way: “You know how it feels when you first hit your thumb with a hammer? Imagine that every day. That excruciating, shooting, nagging pain – that was my life. It was like I kept hitting myself in the thumb with a hammer over and over. I would herniate a disc, have a fusion, it was just a vicious cycle.

“Now my mind says, ‘Don’t hit yourself with a hammer again.’ And that is what the program is all about. They teach you how to take care of the pain and keep it under control before it becomes a problem.”

Learn more about our Restorative Pain Program here.