Who We Are
Dr. Dan Bates
Dan brings the WHY with diagnosis and science, breaking down complex topics with easy-to-understand metaphors and thoughtful algorithms.
Dan is a Sports and Exercise Medicine Specialist. His new clinic “Back, Neck and Joint”, is in Melbourne, Australia. He is the former Managing Director at Metro Pain Group, Monash Clinical Research and is the Board Chairman at Monash House Private Hospital. Dan works full-time with people suffering from back, neck and joint pain (thus the clinic name). Prior to this he has worked extensively in Sports Medicine and for multiple professional and national sporting teams. He was the head doctor at Australian Football League teams Melbourne and North Melbourne.
He got interested in chronic pain because of his personal experience with his mum, who has had 4 spinal operations and a lifetime of pain. He also became interested as his waiting lists grew. It meant that anyone that was able to wait, was suffering chronic pain. Once that happened, he needed some new solutions to care for his patients.
His research career has been broad, covering exercise-induced asthma, examination techniques, biologics, osteoarthritis, chronic pain, and neuromodulation. He lectures nationally and internationally regularly, has three kids, and has the world's most tolerant wife.
Dan is passionate about breaking down barriers between patients and providers and helping patients take back what pain has stolen from them.
Coach Justine Feitelson
Justine brings the HOW - how do we actually implement these concepts considering the real life implications and mental and physical struggles chronic pain patients have?
Justine Feitelson is a chronic pain patient and founder and CEO of Resilient Warrior Coaching. She is also Vice President of The Empower You Chronic Pain Foundation. She is a Pain Coach and Movement Professional who works with complex pain patients in particular. After largely recovering from a brain injury suffered in 2011, she was diagnosed with CRPS in 2019 and has since set forth on a path to better understand pain and human movement so she could improve her life and others. She quickly realized our own bodies are the greatest tool to create change, yet we are often missing taking advantage of our most powerful asset.
Justine felt an immense void in patient education around CRPS, how complex pain manifests, available treatment options, and how to work more collaboratively with physicians in the traditional pain space. She is passionate about bridging the gap in understanding and expectations between patients and providers by empowering patients to be their own advocates and take control of the pieces of their pain management journey they impact through her MARSMethod, as well as helping physicians better understand the very real challenges patients with complex, chronic diseases face and improving empathy and inclusion.
Justine has a B.A. from Washington State University, is an OPEX Certified Coaching Professional (CCP), and Level 3 Neurostudio practitioner. She began her movement career in Cross Fit, getting her Cross Fit L1 (CF-OL1), USAWL-L1 (olympic lifting) and Adaptive & Inclusive Trainer (AIT) certifications. She then began moving more into individual design and addressing compensations/mobility with Pain Free Performance Specialist (PPSC) and Low Pressure Fitness L1-Trainer (LPF-L1) credentials, and has more recently integrated a sensory/brain-based approach through a neuro lens.
Living with a rare, chronic, difficult to treat or poorly understood disease is unfortunately beyond what the medical system is designed to support. It often lacks the communication and individualized attention to detail beyond medical interventions that help patients understand what they can control and what affects the way we experience pain outside of medications and more invasive treatments. Doctors don’t have the time or ability to cover and address the vast majority of variables in patients lives that are dramatically impacting their quality of life with chronic pain. But it’s typically not because they don’t care.
There are diagnostic and therapeutic limitations they encounter, that set everyone up for frustration - especially with less common pathologies.
The challenge with chronic pain is teasing out all the inputs resulting in the outputs the patent is experiencing.
Physicians job is to diagnose and manage treatments and interventions. Patients job is to manage everything else about their life that affects pain. Our job on this podcast is to help you identify what those things are and teach you how to change them more effectively so you can shave off more pain as a patient, and improve your communication and awareness towards these issues as a provider so you get better outcomes.
Patients need to be empowered to better understand their options, communicate their symptoms, and impact pain. Providers need more target ways to pull the appropriate information out of patients and more effectively investigate.