Norman Marcus Pain Institute
Areas of Expertise: Pain Medicine
Norman Marcus, M.D. is Clinical Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Psychiatry and Dirrector of the Division of Muscle Pain Research at NYU School of Medicine, Director of the Norman Marcus Pain Institute, and a past president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine.
He is a member of five professional societies and has presented over 100 lectures about pain management and diagnoses to audiences throughout the world.
Dr. Marcus has been voted as one of New York City's Best Doctors for more than ten consecutive years by Castle Connolly.
After two years as a staff physician at the Headache Unit at Montefiore Hospital, Dr Marcus in 1977 co-founded and directed the first pain center in NYC at Montefiore Hospital. He went on to establish and direct pain centers at Lenox Hill Hospital in NYC from 1983-98 and The Princess Margaret Hospital in Windsor, UK from 1997-2001. Dr. Marcus joined the NYU Pain Management staff in 2002 and was made Director of Muscle Pain Research in the Department of Anesthesiology in 2007.
He discovered that he could electrically identify the specific muscle(s) causing pain in a region of the body and with Stevens Institute of Technology's Biomedical Engineering Department, developed an FDA approved instrument, The Muscle Pain Detector (MPDD), which has been validated in a blinded randomized controlled trial at the NYU School of Medicine.
Pain is generally the result of damage to the body. Pain from a broken bone or surgery is easy to understand because there is a clear episode of damage to tissue. Sometimes however the pain persists even after the usual six weeks healing time. Where is it coming from?
Many physicians believe we do not understand the mechanism of longstanding back pain and therefore the most common diagnosis used is non-specific low back pain, accounting for 70-80% of cases. Patients may have MRIs, CTs and X-rays that show some damage in the spine or in the disc but we know that many patients have the same findings of damage without any pain at all.
At our center we believe that muscle related pain is an important overlooked reason for most non-specific low back pain as well as any other persistent pain problem including neck, shoulder and limb pain in addition to such unusual pain presentations as reflex sympathetic dystrophy (complex regional pain syndrome). Muscles when accurately diagnosed and treated effectively can result in elimination of the pain.