There’s nothing more debilitating than pain that never lets go. If pain has been following you like a shadow, clouding your day as you try to accomplish daily tasks, you’re not alone. Chronic pain affects one in five adults, leaving an estimated 50 Americans suffering from this public health epidemic. If you’ve lived with pain for years, you’ve probably tried everything—pain pills, surgeries, and endless doctor visits. But what if relief was possible without relying on medications that only mask the symptoms? At the Rizor Institute, a team of top specialists is turning that hope into reality.
Offering a completely new type of treatment that goes beyond symptoms, this inpatient and outpatient interdisciplinary pain management facility in Suwanee is changing the way we think about chronic pain. Dr. Randy F. Rizor, an anesthesiologist and Rizor’s Medical Director, founded the Rizor Institute to give high impact chronic pain patients a better solution.
“I developed the treatment at the Rizor Institute because I observed in my practice that for some patients with severe chronic pain, regular pain treatments don’t work,” says Dr. Rizor, who has over 30 years of experience treating high impact chronic pain. “And often patients go through a long treatment from multiple physicians using medications, procedures, even multiple surgeries, and in the end, they’re no better off than they were before, and sometimes even worse.”
The Rizor Institute opened just this year, but its program has blossomed. With the capacity of up to 64 patients and the only in-and-out patient adult facility in the state, Rizor involves several teams across different disciplines. Equipped with a three-year Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF) accreditation, Georgia’s first residential rehabilitation program is making waves in chronic pain management and treatment – as well as opioid recovery.
The connection between chronic pain and the opioid crisis is a harsh reality. For many, pain medications become a lifeline—but for one in ten, they become a dangerous dependency. With opioid overdose deaths increasing by a staggering 492% from 2000 to 2023, the Rizor Institute’s physicians were determined to find a less risky and more effective way to treat these ailing patients.
Living with chronic pain usually comes with a big price tag, with pills and ineffective treatments eating up an average of $16k per year. Instead of throwing ineffective pills at patients, the Rizor Institute team embraces a patient-first approach through Interdisciplinary Pain Management (IPM). Specifically developed to treat pain with the least number of opioids possible, this groundbreaking treatment method saves both money and lives. The IPM method involves a full team of physicians, behavioral specialists, physical therapists, nurses, and care coordinators, all taking an integrated pain management approach as they support patients to recovery.
Providing patients comprehensive, quality care in the same place, the Rizor Institute is a sanctuary of recovery and restoration. A therapy team covers physical recondition, like addressing range of motion, strength, and endurance, while Rizor’s behavioral therapists use cognitive behavioral therapy, sleep hygiene, and pain education to give patients a proactive mindset. Patients achieve these physical strides all while the physicians reduce patients’ opioid intake by 25-50% every week.
“Pain is a perception,” says Leah Swain, Rizor Institute’s business development director. “When we are able to take patients through pain school and retrain them as far as what they think about their pain and how they’re able to control their pain, what modalities that they can use in place of taking the pain medicine, I think it opens up a whole new world for them.”
If you’re tired of putting up with pain, how do you get plugged into Rizor? The first step is getting a referral from your doctor. Next, Rizor’s medical team will assess if you meet the necessary criteria, like having chronic, benign pain for at least three months, and will assign you to a personalized inpatient or outpatient treatment plan. The 24/7 care inpatient program lasts an average of four to six weeks, while the five-day-a-week outpatient care program typically takes four to ten weeks.
To participate in either program, patients must want to get better and be motivated to work towards their goal. Patients, particularly inpatient ones, will temporarily change their lifestyles, alter their work schedule, and rearrange their family commitments or childcare, but the effort is worth it. According to Kriegel & Associates, consultant for the Rizor Institute, patients who complete their program experience a 276% increase in physical functioning, a 45% reduction in pain, an 85% reduction in opioid intake, and a 60% return to work. With a lot of effort, education, and patience, chronic pain sufferers make steps every day towards their recovery at the Rizor Institute.
“We do a whole celebration at the end, because it takes people to have commitment toward changing their idea around that they don’t have to be dependent on this said drug,” Swain says, reminding us that recovery does not mean instant gratification.
Both Rizor’s inpatient and outpatient programs start bright and early around 8 a.m. for a full day of occupational therapy, pain school, individual sessions, physical therapy, and group therapy. Occupational therapists help patients find ways to work around pain as they accomplish challenging everyday tasks, like taking the stairs or making breakfast, while pain school with Dr. Jill Dermyer, Rizor Institute’s Program Director and licensed clinical psychologist, teaches patients to retrain the way their brains process and perceive pain
During a typical pain neuroscience education session, a therapist will sit down with the patient for a 15-to-30-minute verbal appointment. They’ll use pictures, books, and scenarios to teach the patient how their nervous system responds to pain. The more educated someone is about their pain, the less likely they are to fall into the vicious cycle of catastrophizing and stressing about their condition.
“The brain is an extremely complex organ,” shares Dr. Alan L. Wang, Rizor’s chief executive officer. “And neurotransmitters are how we deal with emotions every day. When you look at people with depression – dementia, manic depression, schizophrenia, all of that is due to imbalances in the chemical hormones in our brain. And pain is definitely a perception that’s also around that.”
Dr. Wang, who serves on the Georgia Task Force for Opioids and is part of the Georgia House of Representatives’ Alternatives to Opioids for Pain Management special committee, also points out that different cultures perceive pain in a unique way, adding an extra layer of complexity on an already convoluted area of study. Between 2019 and 2021, the CDC Weekly’s adult chronic pain study revealed that 22% of women (over 28 million) and 19.7% of men (over 23 million) suffer from chronic pain, while 7.6% of women (over 9 million) and 6.2% of men (over 7 million) reported high-impact pain. Chronic pain impacts all genders, races, and ages, all of whom have vastly different responses and reactions to their unseen affliction.
There’s a big link between pain-free physical wellness and mental health. If your bad foot keeps you back from the family camping trip, or if standing for a long work shift is a Herculean effort, you probably feel sad, frustrated, anxious, excluded, or all the above. Living with any chronic condition or illness, from diabetes to heart disease, is difficult. But when it comes to pain management, where perception, psychology, and behavior go hand in hand, your entire day revolves around avoiding what hurts.
“The things that people take for granted you can’t even enjoy, because your mind constantly focuses on how bad it hurts to roll over in bed, to get up and make a cup of coffee, to walk your dog… Anything,” a patient named Angie shares in her testimonial. Suffering lower back pain for 20 years, Angie felt like a lost cause, resigned to taking ineffective pain shots for the rest of her life. Not anymore, thanks to the Rizor Institute.
Now that this pain rehabilitation center is giving back the freeing gift of mobility, patients can return to doing all the things they love. And with expert physicians who look at the whole person, taking their life and well-being into consideration after the program ends, Rizor’s patients can look forward to living again.
“They’re all brilliant and I’ve been very impressed with what I’ve had here,” Angie says. “They’ve taught me why my low back hurts so bad by identifying weaker muscles. By watching me move and talking with the other therapists, they were able to develop an individualized program so I could go back to functioning. The entire team has been the most positive group of people that I could’ve ever imagined, and I needed that. They encourage you, motivate you, and keep you going, and I couldn’t say more about how positive of an environment that it’s been for me. I don’t want to leave!”
And Rizor isn’t just grabbing patients’ attention. Its CARF accreditation is a major honor and testament to this top-notch facility’s rigorous and comprehensive quality program. It takes a lot to impress state surveyors, but when CARF’s team surveyed the Rizor Institute, they showered this rehabilitation center with praise.
In their survey, CARF listed many positive areas of strength, from Rizor’s dedicated staff to their effective program. The esteemed rehabilitation accreditation entity sums up Rizor’s program best. “The program is commended for having a team of knowledgeable, compassionate, enthusiastic, confident, and dedicated clinicians who are committed to ensuring patients receive the highest quality of care and support that they need,” CARF praised in the survey. “They are open to new resources and are interested in the development of the pain program in order to use these resources effectively and provide the patients with the best service possible to achieve positive outcomes.”
Many adults cope with chronic pain, but their stories go untold. These chronic pain sufferers are everyday people — the grandparents, grocery store clerks, and retired professional athletes desperate to live normal lives again, enough to undergo risky surgeries and medications. And if their drastic, “final option” surgery goes wrong, they’re often left in an even worse place than where they started. But the Rizor Institute wants to widen this conversation around chronic pain and let you know that there are answers beyond the pills. Hope can be found, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
“We have an extremely well-developed, hard-working, and top-of-the-line clinical team designed specifically for chronic pain treatment,” Dr. Wang says. “So, we’re very proud of all of this. This is something not just for the city of Suwannee and Gwinnett County, but the state of Georgia. We are working on a few different partnerships where we can hopefully be able to offer this to not only more Georgia citizens but for others in the Southeast and across the country who need an innovative solution for their high impact chronic pain.”
Pain doesn’t have to define your life. At the Rizor Institute, patients are reclaiming their futures, discovering the possibility of days without suffering, and finding a new kind of freedom—the freedom to live fully again. With empathy, expertise, and a commitment to seeing every patient through to the other side, the Rizor Institute stands as a beacon of hope. For so many, it’s a place where they learn to love life again—and that is the greatest victory.
