About the Founder

Dr Dan O’Dea is a specialist musculoskeletal GP with an extended experience in anaesthetics and pain medicine.

Dan graduated medicine from Flinders University in 2006 and worked as a GP in Cooroy between 2011 and 2022 as well as working concurrently as a GP anaesthetist at Gympie Hospital from 2011-2020. While working as a GP there was always one group of patients in particular that troubled him. The chronic pain patient. This group of patients all seemed to suffer so much and more than any other group we seemed to have very little in the way of explanation for their pain and disability and thereby extremely limited options to help them.

He was lucky enough in 2020 to spend some time upskilling with pain specialist Dr Paul Frank at his clinic in Buderim. During this time, he was able to gain extra insight into the fact that there is actually a much better understanding of chronic pain with more treatment options than is taught in medical school or General Practice training. As a result of this experience, he was lucky enough to join Dr Frank in his clinic from the start of 2021 helping him with his patient load and learning more and more about complex chronic pain management.

As a result of this work, he wanted to learn more and more about chronic pain and what else we could do to help these patients. This led him to extended training in Musculoskeletal (MSK) Medicine with the Australian Association of Musculoskeletal Medicine (AAMM). He started and completed the certificate of Musculoskeletal Medicine in 2022. Musculoskeletal Medicine proved to be yet another area of medicine that is extremely poorly taught (if at all) in Australian medical schools and General Practice training. He found that as a GP we were only really taught to do the absolute basics of assessment and examination and then generally rely on imaging to diagnose musculoskeletal and pain conditions. As a result, diagnostic accuracy and thereby treatment effectiveness were unsurprisingly poor.

The MSK training has a strong foundation in the regenerative medicine techniques on top of their standard training in much more extensive history, examination, functional imaging and treatment options for musculoskeletal and pain conditions. This led to extended training in Prolotherapy and regenerative injection techniques under the late Dr Margaret Taylor. Margie was Australia’s only Prolotherapy trainer and did so for over 20 years until he was fortunate enough to be in her last ever teaching cohort in 2022. After this inspiring course he dived head first into utilising these techniques as a treatment option for the multitude of patients he was seeing in the pain clinic as well as in general practice. With time and experience one thing became very clear. It was nearly unbelievable to that this technique has been around since the 1950s and isn’t used more widely or even taught in standard medical training. To this day most doctors have not even heard of it. The use of Dextrose Prolotherapy and its descendants including Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP) injections and Neural Prolotherapy techniques are proven to be an extremely safe, affordable and effective treatment modality for a multitude of MSK and chronic pain conditions. It also became an extremely useful adjunct in the pain clinic offering a different approach that was often complimentary and effective for patients that hadn’t had success with standard pain medicine interventions.

At the end of 2022 he decided he could no longer ignore the vast number of patients that he could potentially help and left General Practice to practice full time with Dr Frank at Resolve Pain focussing on the MSK treatment options, in addition to the standard pain management practices. Over this period, he has spent countless hours learning and training utilising ultrasound-guided techniques to further improve his diagnostic accuracy and treatment options for complex patients. Dan is now a board member with the AAMM and proudly assists the running of the organisation whose primary goal is to extend the knowledge, training and skills of doctors of Australia and overseas in MSK medicine and regenerative treatment techniques.

He is on a never-ending quest to find more methods to help patients and refine emerging techniques. There are 3 basic criteria for any new techniques and treatments to be considered.

They must be

  1. Safe

  2. Have a reasonable scientific basis of effect and/or research data supporting their use

  3. Affordable

One example is the utilisation of Photobiomodulation (or low-level laser therapy), which after hundreds of hours of research he discovered was yet another safe, effective and relatively affordable treatment technique that has almost no recognition in standard health training.

Another is the importance of assessing and treating fascia and utilising biotensegrity principles to treat pain. This has also been a revelation to how he practices and treats patients. This knowledge coincides and overlaps with a lot of treatment modalities from the myofascial realm (such as Osteopathy, Acupuncture, Rolfing, Bowen Therapy to name a few).

In 2025 he made the difficult decision to leave the team at Resolve Pain to start up Nexus Pain Management. He remains affiliated with the Resolve Pain team but in order to grow his treatment techniques and expand the regenerative treatment options for patients he felt the best way to do this was to start up his own clinic. He hopes to keep growing, educating patients and health practitioners alike to keep expanding treatment options for patients that have been unable to get significant answers or results to date. The name Nexus Pain Management actually comes from what he hopes to achieve with the clinic. A Nexus is defined as “a connection or series of connections linking two or more things” and/or “a central or focal point”. We hope that we can become this Nexus of pain management for our patients. A Nexus between traditional pain management approaches and emerging regenerative treatments. A Nexus between standard treatment modalities, such as physiotherapy, but combining these techniques with the less well (medically) understood, like myofascial techniques, that add their own potential benefits to treatment outcomes.

We hope you can join us on this journey as we progress and build into the future.