Twenty years on the inside, then the switch

He trained the way the system wanted: biology and medicine at UMKC, general surgery at Cook County Hospital, anesthesia residencies at Illinois Masonic and Washington University–Barnes, where he served as chief resident. He built the academic career that followed — assistant professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics at Saint Louis University, director of a pediatric acute pain service, deputy director of the institutional review board. Along the way he was also a strict vegetarian who preached the dietary guidelines to his patients and told the ones with rising blood sugar that their numbers were “not too bad.”

He was wrong on both counts, and he says so first because the correction only means something once you have seen him be wrong. “Not too bad” was true against a reference range built for a healthy population and false against the number that actually predicts who develops neuropathy, who fails to heal after a procedure, and who ends up back in this office a year later no better. A bite of beef on bun at a Kansas City barbecue counter ended the vegetarian argument faster than any journal article did. Both changes are why bloodwork is part of a pain consultation at this practice instead of a separate program sold afterward, and why the metabolic terrain gets discussed on equal footing with the disc or the joint. Read why.

What the credentials actually mean

Board certification is not one line here — it is five: anesthesiology, pain medicine, interventional pain management (ABIPP, DABIPP), addiction medicine and obesity medicine, plus a diplomate designation as a Metabolic Health Practitioner and fellowship recognition as a Fellow of Interventional Pain Physicians. Two added-competency certifications sit underneath that stack and rarely get mentioned on a physician bio anywhere: Coding, Compliance and Practice Management, and Controlled Substance Management. He treats compliance as a discipline he holds, not a rule imposed on him — the same instinct that made him Deputy Director of a university IRB and a Department of Homeland Security civil surgeon.

Academic posts and the national platform

He has been faculty twice: at Cardinal Glennon and Saint Louis University in the 1990s, and again since 2024 teaching pain and addiction to the KCU Freeman Health System psychiatry residency. Between those two stints he has published peer-reviewed work in Neuromodulation, Pain Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, Anesthesia & Analgesia and Pain Physician, served as a review editor for PharmacoEconomics, and delivered two ASIPP national keynotes — Treating Metainflammation and Interventional Pain in 2020 and Metabolic Inflammation and the Hedonic Treadmill in New Orleans in 2021 — along with a 2025 ASIPP talk on revenue enhancement through outcome measurement. The throughline across all of it is the same one that runs through this website: pain, metabolism and the economics of care are one subject, not three.

Leadership, because volume is not the same as outcome

He has chaired anesthesia and pain departments at two hospital systems, served as a regional anesthesia director, run a surgical ambulatory center, and led the Missouri Society of Interventional Pain Physicians as president in two separate decades. That is an administrator’s résumé wrapped around a clinician’s license, and the MBA treats a delayed diagnosis or a procedure done without a diagnostic block first as a preventable expense, not just a clinical miss.

Seva, and the foundation that runs alongside the practice

Seva means service performed without expectation of return, credit or exchange, and it is the organizing principle behind the Sevadar Foundation — a 501(c)(3) he funds personally, currently self-funded, running three program DBAs including an opioid-safety initiative and a federally listed patient safety organization. He has taken that same ethic on medical missions to Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, and onto the boards of Exoneration Nation, Arise Veterans, U Gro and March of Dimes.

Opioid stewardship, in his own words

“Not a gestapo policy. Harm reduction in the context of human frailty.” That sentence is how he describes the actual philosophy, and the data behind it is uncomfortable enough to publish rather than soften. Patients arriving at this practice after 2.5 or more years of unmanaged pain average more than 90 morphine milligram equivalents a day. Under interventional treatment, 21% are fully weaned within 90 days and 34% within a year; across the practice’s established, longer-term population, fewer than 1% remain above 90 MME. Practice-reported figures from our own population, not trial outcomes, and individual results vary. The goal was never zero for its own sake — it is the minimum exposure that preserves function and keeps someone out of withdrawal while the interventional plan takes over the work the opioid was doing. The full position.

Nationally, that same argument played out publicly on International Overdose Awareness Day, when coverage of the crisis’s toll ran through outlets including the AP News wire. It is the backdrop this practice operates against, not a talking point invented for a webpage.

What that means for your appointment

It means the person reviewing your case has been wrong before, in writing and in public, and changed course when the physiology told him to. It means bloodwork, sleep and behavior get discussed at a pain visit, not filed separately. It means a procedure gets explained as a test with an answer, not sold as a fix. And it means if you are on opioids already, the conversation starts from where you are, not from a lecture about where you should be. What to expect at the first visit.

Common questions

Related reading

• What to expect at the first visit
• Opioid stewardship
• The metabolic terrain and pain
• Sleep, movement and behavior
• Contact