Pain Unfiltered · American Society of Pain & Neuroscience

The Role of Interventionalists for Bendy Bodies

May 5, 2025·33 min·3 clips

A pain specialist discovers what it's like to be on the other side of the table.

The hosts open Episode 2 of Season 3 by thanking Salute Medical for stepping in as the first sponsor of the season. They link that support to innovation, data, evidence, closed-loop technology, and automated artificial intelligence programming. From there, the conversation settles into hypermobility and the clinical confusion that often follows it. The guest says genetics plays a role in reaching the diagnosis, but that clinicians do not need to be geneticists to make the call. There is also a reminder that geneticists are usually not very involved on the treatment side. That leads into the central question of whether hypermobility joint issues are over diagnosed or under diagnosed. The answer is both. The guest says many people with these conditions are suffering somewhere on the HSD and hypermobile EDS spectrum. The exact label matters less than making sure the symptoms are treated. The conversation then turns sharp on the way some clinics use the word EDS as a brand. The guest describes clinics that are putting hypermobility and EDS into their names because they know the topic is hot. One clinic visit gives the clearest example. A patient flew in from the east coast to see the guest after being seen at an EDS and fibromyalgia clinic. The note still did not actually say what diagnosis had been reached. It ended with EDS slash HSD evaluation performed, which left the patient without a clear answer. She was a nurse, and she was disappointed that the visit did not include a more detailed evaluation. The guest says the clinic had done a score. That is only one small piece of the puzzle. The skin and the rest of the body were not really examined. That is where the discussion lands hardest. It is less about labels than about what gets missed when a clinic stops at the label. The closing stretch shifts back to the practical value of making these syndromes more familiar to interventionists. The guest thanks the hosts for teaching and spreading the word about conditions interventionists do not have as much experience with. The hosts then invite the guest to share social links, including HypermobilityMD, HypermobilityMD.com, and BendyBodiesPodcast.com, before the episode wraps. The final note stays plain and practical: the more familiar these syndromes become to physicians, the better the care can be.

As heard by us

A clinician-focused look at hypermobility, diagnosis, and the limits of what labels explain.

Pain Unfiltered takes on hypermobility, HSD, and hypermobile EDS from an interventional pain and spine angle, and it keeps circling back to what clinicians can still do when diagnosis is murky.

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Why you'd press play

You get a frank look at hypermobility, HSD versus hypermobile EDS, and why one score is not the whole picture.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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