One year ago, I joined the FIAPM fellowship at Ashirvad Institute for Pain Management & Research.
I knew why I wanted to do it.
I wanted to help people living with chronic pain. I wanted to help them get their lives back.
But honestly, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into.
Before appearing for the entrance exam, I actually did a three-month online course in pain management. I was in my postpartum phase at the time, and I wanted to understand what pain medicine was all about before taking the plunge. I also knew that it was going to be very different from anaesthesia, and I didn’t want to enter the field without at least knowing what I was signing up for.
I ended up getting the third rank in the entrance exam.
And since I was from Mumbai and had a six-month-old baby, Ashirvad was the obvious choice.
I joined with a fairly simple idea of what pain medicine was.
Blocks.
Needles.
Procedures.
Find the pain, do a block, make the patient better.
Turns out, I was quite wrong.
Very early into the fellowship, I met my mentor, Dr. Lakshmi Vas ma’am. And one of the first things that really stayed with me was her way of looking at chronic pain.
“Muscles can actually be the pain generator?”
I remember thinking — really?
That was probably the beginning of a much bigger process.
The whole year, in many ways, was about unlearning.
Unlearning the traditional way I had started thinking about pain. Understanding that chronic pain isn’t always about finding one obvious structure and injecting it. Learning to look at the patient differently. Looking beyond the MRI, beyond the X-ray, beyond the obvious pathology.
And slowly learning that sometimes the answer is not where you initially think it is.
There were definitely ups and downs through the year. There were days when things came easily and days when they didn’t. There was a lot to learn, a lot to practice and, more importantly, a lot to rethink.
I won’t say that after one year I have become some Dhurandhar of pain medicine.
Far from it.
There is still a lot that I need to learn. There are procedures I need to do many more times before I can say I have mastered them. Pain medicine is a field where experience, clinical judgement and practice matter enormously, and I know that my journey is only beginning.
But what Ashirvad has given me is something I value even more — a very strong foundation.
And if I had to pick one tool that has made the biggest difference to me, it would be Ultrasound Guided Dry Needling (USGDN).
I call it my Brahmastra.
Not because I think I can now do every USGDN procedure perfectly. I can’t. That will come with more practice and experience.
But after this year, I can say that I understand it, I am confident with it, and I have genuinely mastered the fundamentals of it. I know what I am looking for, what I am targeting and, most importantly, why I am doing what I am doing.
That confidence is probably the most valuable thing I am taking back with me.
And for that, I will always be grateful to Dr. Lakshmi Vas ma’am.
She didn’t just teach me a procedure. She changed the way I look at pain.
That, for me, is probably the biggest takeaway from this fellowship.
A year ago, I joined Ashirvad thinking pain medicine was mostly about blocks.
A year later, I am walking out knowing that pain medicine is much bigger than that.
There is anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, psychology, clinical reasoning, communication, procedures — and above all, the person sitting in front of you.
I started this fellowship wanting to learn how to treat pain.
I am finishing it with a much better understanding of how to understand the person who is in pain.
And I think that’s a pretty good place to continue from.
