Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP
Headache Express is led by Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, an interventional pain physician practising in the St. Louis region. He is board certified in anesthesiology, pain medicine, interventional pain, addiction medicine and obesity medicine, and is licensed in both Missouri and Illinois.
That combination is unusual, and it is the reason this clinic is built the way it is. Interventional training is what makes same-visit nerve blocks possible. Addiction medicine is why the rebound cycle gets named here rather than missed — the mechanism that turns episodic headache into daily headache is the same one that makes frequent acute dosing self-sustaining, and treating the headache while feeding that cycle does not work.
He has had them since he was seventeen
Dr. Padda has lived with chronic cluster headache since the age of 17.
Not migraine. Cluster — the one that arrives at the same hour, drills in behind one eye, and lasts long enough each time that you learn to watch the clock. He spent years inside that cycle before he found a way out of it, and the route out was not handed to him by anybody. He had to go and find it.
Cluster headache is sometimes called suicide headache. That name is not dramatic licence and it is not a figure of speech — it exists because of what the pain does to people who cannot get it treated, and because the rate of suicidal thinking among people living with it is genuinely elevated. Anyone who has had a bout understands the name immediately. Most people who have not had one find it hard to believe a headache could earn it.
That is the gap this clinic was built to close. When you describe pacing the room at three in the morning, or pressing your fist into your eye socket because the pressure is the only thing that touches it, or being told it is stress, or sinus, or that you should try to relax — none of that has to be explained here. It is already understood, from the inside.
It is also why the oxygen page is as blunt as it is about flow rates and masks. Getting that detail wrong is the difference between a treatment that works within fifteen minutes and one more person concluding that oxygen does not work for them.
If you are having thoughts of harming yourself, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, 24 hours a day. Cluster headache is treatable, and the pain is not a permanent condition of your life.
How this clinic approaches headache
Most headache care is either too slow or too shallow. Neurology waiting lists run to months, and an emergency department will stop an attack without ever naming what caused it. The gap in between is where most people with a severe recurring headache actually live.
Headache Express treats the attack in front of us, using the tools a headache specialist would reach for — intravenous therapy, nerve blocks, SPG blocks and oxygen — and then works out what the headache actually is, so the next one is less likely.
We will also tell you when a treatment is not well supported. The oxygen therapy page states plainly that high-flow normobaric oxygen has strong evidence in cluster headache while hyperbaric oxygen does not have strong evidence in migraine. That is the standard we hold ourselves to.
Board certifications and affiliations
