Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP

“We believe you. We’re not going to make you prove it first. We start by believing you, and then we measure — because you deserve both.”

Role

Dr. Padda serves as Chief Medical Officer of Valor Villages. His responsibility in the partnership is the medical side of a very hard situation: the serious comorbidities our patients carry, and the conditions stacked on top of them.

His clinical position is that medicine delivered above someone’s circumstances does not work. You cannot treat a man’s back if he is sleeping in his car, and you cannot correct anyone’s metabolism from a bus stop.

Clinical focus

• Interventional pain management, with a practice built on reducing opioid burden
• Metabolic inflammation and its role in chronic pain, depression and addiction
• PTSD and trauma, assessed by measurement rather than impression
• Addiction medicine, including the hedonic mechanisms underneath substance use

Education and training

• BA Biology and MD, University of Missouri–Kansas City
• General Surgery residency, Cook County Hospital / University of Illinois–Chicago
• Anesthesia residency, Illinois Masonic Medical Center
• Anesthesia residency, Washington University–Barnes, with pediatric anesthesia at St. Louis Children’s Hospital; Chief Resident
• MBA, Saint Louis University
• Certified Physician Executive, American College of Physician Executives

Academic appointments

• Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology, Saint Louis University / Cardinal Glennon
• Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Saint Louis University
• Associate Director, Pediatric Anesthesiology; Director, Pediatric Acute Pain Service
• Deputy Director, Saint Louis University Institutional Review Board
• Faculty, Kansas City University / Freeman Health System psychiatry residency — pain and addiction (2024–present)

Professional leadership

• President, Missouri Society of Interventional Pain Physicians (2002–2010; 2023–present)
• Board Member and Examiner, American Board of Interventional Pain Physicians
• Board of Directors, American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians

National presentations

Dr. Padda has twice delivered the national keynote at the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians: Treating Metainflammation and Interventional Pain (2020) and Metabolic Inflammation and the Hedonic Treadmill (2021, New Orleans).

Publications

His peer-reviewed work appears in Neuromodulation, Pain Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, Ophthalmology, Anesthesia & Analgesia, Paediatric Anaesthesia, Dermatologic Surgery, Southern Medical Journal and Pain Physician. He is a review editor for PharmacoEconomics and coauthor of Next Level Your Life.