About Centennial Rehabilitation

Services

Centennial Rehabilitation offers a range of services dealing with complex injuries or medical conditions. We work with chronic pain and traumatic brain injury patients, and with people who have suffered occupational injuries on the job.

Our Chronic Pain services are intensive, outpatient programs and are grouped together in a continuum of care, based on intensity of treatment and condition, but practically we think of three different service groups. The the full time, daily treatment program for chronic pain patients is called the Pain Medicine Center. It provides interdisciplinary and integrated medical and behavioral rehabilitation to assist patients in increasing their function and developing new skills to better cope with chronic pain conditions. In the course of this program we also provide individual psychotherapy. Treatment in the Pain Medicine Center lasts from two to six weeks of active care and follow up.

A less intensive program for Chronic Pain patients, geared more to patients who may be working or otherwise unable to attend full time treatment is called the Pain Wellness Program. This is a part time education and treatment program designed to complement the care a patient is receiving from his or her providers and to “round out” individual treatment plans. Treatment in this program is offered up to three times per week for six weeks.

The CRPS (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome) Clinic provides evaluation and treatment specifically geared towards early identification and appropriate treatment of this complicated chronic pain condition.

Treatment in any variation of our Chronic Pain programs includes patient education about pain and medications, exercise, body mechanics education, recreational therapy, biofeedback, meditation, aquatherapy, stress reduction training, and the development of coping skills. These services are provided in concert with treatment and medication management from our affiliated Pain Medicine/Addictionology, Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, Psychiatry, Chiropractic, and Psychological providers, who include both MD’s and PhD’s.

Head Injury Rehabilitation is a daily outpatient treatment program for traumatic brain injury patients whose goal is to assist patients in developing the skills necessary to overcome the effects of a brain injury. After identifying cognitive deficits through neuropsychological evaluation, we work with patients on ways to compensate for these deficits in the areas of daily living and occupational activity that matter to them in resuming their pre-injury lives. This program operates on either a five day per week or a part time schedule for four to eight weeks.

Vocational Rehabilitation services are offered by our Rehabilitation counselors, and include evaluation of occupational potential after an injury, provision of assistance to help injured workers identify and locate new occupational fields, and evaluation of the ergonomic characteristics of workers’ job sites to develop improvements that can be made to avoid exacerbation of injury or future injury. Our Rehabilitation counselors often are called upon as expert witnesses in workers’ compensation or other legal cases to testify as to the extent of occupational impairment resulting from an injury.

History

Centennial Rehabilitation Associates was founded in 1979, proudly celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2009, and now, in 2010, we have embarked on our fourth decade in business! We started out providing vocational rehabilitation and nurse case management services to injured workers and auto accident victims, and continued with those two core services for a number of years. In 1997 we developed the Head Injury Rehabilitation program, an innovative approach to providing comprehensive rehabilitation services to traumatic brain injury patients, in response to what we perceived as a lack of such services in the Denver metro area.

Similarly, our Chronic Pain services were developed out of our experience in working with TBI, case management, and vocational rehabilitation patients, primarily in the area of workers’ compensation and auto injuries. We started working with these patients in 2001 to provide comprehensive services to Chronic Pain patients who were otherwise receiving solely interventional or pharmacological treatments. In recent years we have expanded our work with Chronic Pain patients to include part time services accessible to those patients who are still working but in need of assistance.

Treatment Philosophy and Approach

Patients coming to Centennial Rehabilitation are tangled up in complex injuries or medical conditions that they generally have been dealing with for quite some time. Often they have been involved in a variety of different care scenarios, none of which have provided them with the solutions or relief they are seeking.

Centennial Rehabilitation specializes in treating these complicated cases– be they instances of chronic pain, traumatic brain injury, or occupational injury. These cases have no easy solution, and it is easy for patients to loose their way in the physical, emotional, familial, legal, and occupational complexities typically present in these situations. We work with them to avoid getting overwhelmed by what look like unsolvable situations. Our approach to doing that is to clearly identify each of the barriers preventing recovery and to stay focused on removing or lowering these barriers, one by one. The question for us is always:

“what is getting in the way of the next step for the patient in being able to be more functional, to re-engage in his or her personal or professional life, and to recover the life activities that were pursued before the injury or condition made these so difficult?”

In answering these questions and in helping patients to take those steps it is necessary to view complex cases through different “lenses”, different professional points of view. Only by doing so can we get a clear view of all sides of the problem. This is called an “interdisciplinary” approach and it is a core premise of Centennial’s treatment philosophy.