Centennial Rehabilitation Associates
Centennial Rehabilitation Associates has been engaged in providing rehabilitation services since 1979, and so this year we proudly celebrate our 30th anniversary. We specialize in multidisciplinary care involving chronic pain, traumatic brain injury, vocational rehabilitation, and complicated medical issues requiring nurse case management.
We began as a company providing solely vocational rehabilitation and nurse case management services to patients injured on the job or in auto injuries. We still provide those services, but over the years we have expanded our expertise, first into the provision of rehabilitation services for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) patients and then into providing these same services to Chronic Pain patients. We initiated these expansions because we recognized, from our vocational rehabilitation and case management work, that these patient populations just weren’t being adequately served in our area.
All too often brain injury patients were treated as being permanently disabled without the evaluative work being done to pinpoint the residual cognitive capacity they were left with despite the injury. These areas of cognitive “strength“can be built upon to compensate for capacities lost with the injury. And that is what our TBI program, which we call Head Injury Rehabilitation, is about. It’s about the identificaton of the capacities a patient retains and then the development of compensatory skills using those capacities to bring the patient back to a level of functioning that comes as close as possible to his or her pre-injury level of functioning. It’s a glass-half-full instead of a glass-half-empty approach, and it’s been remarkably successful in returning patients to work and to their pre-injury daily lives. The Head Injury Rehabilitation program has been in existence since 1997 and we have worked successfully with thousands of patients.
A similar motivation led us to the development of our Chronic Pain program, the Pain Medicine Center, which is an intensive daily outpatient program. What we saw with Chronic Pain patients in the medical community was an overwhelming reliance on palliative measures – injections and medications. These provide transitory relief, but miss key components in enabling these patients to lead functional lives despite the pain that has taken over their lives.
Pain is a multifactorial problem, involving not just pain generators that need to be calmed down, but social, behavioral, and lifestyle issues that need to be addressed as well. This is because for pain patients, pain has become the overwhelming factor in their lives, impacting everything. And when this happens, everything in their lives organizes around the pain and therefore all the components of their lives need intervention. We do this with a team comprised of practitioners from Psychology, Neuropsychology, Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, Psychiatry, Neurology, Exercise Physiology, and Therapeutic Recreation in addition to our Vocational Rehabilitation, Counseling and Nursing staff.
The Pain Medicine Center has been in existence since 2002, and is recognized regionally and even nationally for it’s work in rehabilitating these difficult cases.
The newest addition to our services is the Pain Wellness Program, which we have designed specifically as a complementary service for pain patients being treated by other providers. These patients, whether being treated by medical or behavioral providers, need something more, something beyond the scope of an individual provider. The Pain Wellness Program offers this. It provides the education, emotional support, and the physical and behavioral tools that are generally lacking in an outpatient setting, but which are key to an effective treatment plan. The program offers pain education and support, development of coping and adaptive strategies, body mechanics training, targeted exercise, pain management skill building, and stress management. Individual treatment plans may also incorporate a range of other therapies for the patient needing addiction, psychiatric, physical medicine, or psychological interventions. Through participation in the program, patients continue treating with their original care provider but can expect easier compliance with their ongoing treatment, better results from it and an overall improved quality of life.
So that’s Centennial Rehabilitation Associates. An ever evolving organization, guided by it’s time-tried expertise, incorporating the skills and viewpoints of a variety of professionals from different disciplines, and geared towards helping patients recover lives that have been impacted by chronic conditions or injury. We would be delighted to discuss your or patient’s care concerns with you.