Dr. Hector Cases is a pain management specialist with Physician Partners of America, serving the Tampa area. His pain practice is informed by clinical neurology, which he practiced for the first ten years of his career. “It adds an advantage in evaluating and diagnosing, as well as creating a plan of care,” he says. “It also allows me to explain a condition in a logical way that patients understand.” Dr. Cases earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University and his medical degree from Central University of the Caribbean in Puerto Rico. He completed an Internal Medicine internship at Cabrini Medical Center in New York City and a Neurology residency at New York University School of Medicine. After practicing clinical neurology, he decided to focus on pain management and completed a Pain Medicine fellowship at the University of South Florida in Tampa. “It gratifies me to see a patient smile and say they’re feeling better than they have in years,” he says. Dr. Cases’s dual interest in pain management and neurology allows him to take a comprehensive approach to pain medicine that includes medical management, interventional procedures, and fitness and lifestyle changes, thus restoring a patient’s function. He is highly experienced in utilizing spinal cord stimulation, medial branch nerve blocks, radiofrequency ablation (RFA), epidural steroid injections, and EMG/nerve conduction studies to detect nerve damage. “These tools allow me to control pain in my patients. In doing so, it allows the patient to engage in physical exercise, increase functional activity, reduce opioid painkillers, and ultimately increase quality of life,” he says. A native of San Juan, Puerto Rico, he and his wife have four children. He is a car enthusiast who recently took up racing, and also enjoys cycling and other fitness activities.