For a college student, getting drafted may not be the conventional way to discover what you want to do with your life but for Frank Jordan, MD, a pain management specialist with Comprehensive Pain Specialist, it led him to pursue a career in medicine. Jordan was one of the first in West Tennessee to provide pain management services and 25 years later, he continues to provide the latest techniques and modalities to help patients across West Tennessee find relief from pain.
A native of Dickson, Tenn., Jordan began his college career taking general science courses at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, but left before finishing. “The Vietnam War was going on and I decided to join the Air Force after a couple of years in college,” said Jordan. “My training in the Air Force was as a hospital lab technician. That really sparked my interest in medicine as a career, so when I returned to Austin Peay, I knew I wanted to go to medical school.”
In 1976, Jordan began medical school at St. George’s University School of Medicine in Grenada. He completed his medical degree at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis where he also completed his residency training in internal medicine. While working on the UT staff as an internist, Jordan found he enjoyed intensive care therapy, which resulted in his decision to pursue anesthesiology. He remained at UT to complete a residency in anesthesiology as well as worked on the anesthesiology staff at UT.
In 1988, Jordan joined an anesthesia group in Jackson Tenn. “When I came to Jackson I found I was doing a lot of injections for spinal pain since no one else was really doing it. The more I looked into pain management, the more interested I became in it,” said Jordan, who is board certified in internal medicine, anesthesiology and pain management. “I also saw there was a tremendous need for pain management in West Tennessee and felt that I needed to get further training so I could best treat my patients.”
Because there was no advanced training for pain management in West Tennessee, Jordan went to Houston, Texas for additional study in the fellowship program at the Baylor Center for Pain Management. When he retuned, he established a pain management center as a part of his group practice. “I was the only one the area doing pain management and that was really all I was doing,” said Jordan. “In 1999, I decided to go out on my own and established the first full time pain management practice in rural West Tennessee.”
The field of pain management as a sub-specialty was relatively new when Jordan received his training at Baylor. “The field really got started in the late 1980’s, and even when I trained at Baylor in the early ‘90s it was a fairly young subspecialty. There were not many people who had much expertise in it and there was no board certification for it as there is now,” said Jordan.
Jordan says the field has changed quite a bit since he first got into it. “Twenty years ago, no one but a few neurosurgeons were doing interventional work,” he said. “The field of pain management is much more in depth about the actual study of pain, the mechanisms that work and individual techniques that can be used to treat it. There is still a lot of continuing education required of the subspecialty although it is not evolving at the rate it was ten years ago.”
Roughly 80 percent of Jordan’s practice is related to back pain. “Often times people develop chronic back or nerve pain from a variety of reasons and have usually seen multiple physicians for relief before coming to a pain management specialist,” said Jordan. “Once the pain becomes ingrained in a patient, it is hard to eradicate completely.”
Pain, says Jordan, is a personal issue and everyone has a different tolerance for it. “It is my job to determine the source of the pain and the best treatment for it. We have a wide range of treatment options including medications as well as medical, psychological and/or surgical support,” he said. “With some patients we see great success and they never hurt. In others if we can give them 40-60 percent reduction in their level of pain that is good.”
In 2013, Jordan joined the Nashville based group, Comprehensive Pain Specialists, which has more than ten pain management specialists and has offices in multiple states. In West Tennessee, the group has clinics in Jackson, Savannah, Bartlett, Union City and Paris. Jordan provides coverage to all five of these clinics with the assistance of nurse practioners and physician assistants.
Jordan spends his downtime with his family, which includes wife, Celia, their two daughters Rachel and Shelby, son Frank Jr. and granddaughters, Miles and Madeline. His other passion is hunting and fishing, especially big game hunting. “From moose to elk to caribou to deer, I love to hunt it whether it is around West Tennessee or out in Montana. I try to get outside and either hunt or fish when I can,” said Jordan.
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