About Us

Dr. Tanner has been a pain management physician in the Boulder area since 1999. He went to medical school at the University of New England and completed a residency and board certification in neuromusculoskeletal medicine.

During his residency he was trained in medical acupuncture through UCLA and was trained in the related Craig PENS (percutaneous electrical nerve stimulation).

This training laid the foundation for his understanding of the central nervous systems role in chronic pain conditions.

He started practicing as a staff physician at the Boulder Center for Osteopathic Medicine. There he honed his skills as a pain management physician integrating his manual manipulation skills with pharmacological management and massage therapy. At this point the state of the art focused on decreasing the activity of primary pain generators which was beleived to be from injury sites. However, his clinical experience and training started to point him toward the CNS as a pain generator.

Dr. Tanner had a car accident in 2001 that left him with a developing migraine condition that was not being successfully treated. Coincidentally, as he investigated personal treatment options, migraine treatment was evolving towards addressing the central nervous system for the relief of migraine symptoms.

The CNS was found to be best treated by the manual, pharmacological and injection therapies that he already employed putting him in the unique position to empathize with and broadly treat migraine and its many variants. In 2003 he started his pain management clinic that became Creekside Physical Medicine.

Up to this time head and neck pain was treated using one of two medical theories. One postulated that chronic muscle tightness was at the root of this pain and was caused by some form of injury. This theory was opposed by the knowledge that injury follows a linear healing pattern and resolves within three months. The other theory was based in the idea that a nerve in the neck is pinched causing shoulder, neck and head pain. Neuroanatomical facts made this an improbability and consequently left doctors with a very low success rate in treating these conditions.

As Dr. Tanner gained exposure to the latest advances in migraine/CNS based conditions it became clear that this was the source of the majority of head and neck pain. This pain is caused by increased nerve activity traveling through nerves that leave the base of the brain and go directly to the muscles and structure that are painful.

These understandings brought him to the forefront of the treatment of head and neck pain. Since then he keeps himself apprised of the latest in migraine treatment and theory through personal study, a clinical practice that is largely directed to the treatment of head and neck pain, as well as attending national and international conferences.