Dr. Cindy Tiu is a double board-certified physician in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Pain Medicine, and the founder of Artisan Interventional Pain, a new independent practice opening this fall in Plano, Texas. She recorded this conversation from her home office days after moving to Plano — boxes still in the background, a trip she'd booked years earlier looming the following week — talking through the story of how a college tennis injury pointed her toward medicine, and why she decided to build her own practice only two years out of fellowship.
Key Takeaways
- Dr. Tiu left an employed physician role after two years to found Artisan Interventional Pain, only two years out of her fellowship — a decision she called "a pretty big leap of faith."
- Her treatment philosophy is function-first: instead of just asking how to lower a pain score, she starts by asking what the pain is preventing the patient from doing, and works to get them back to it.
- She sees three broad patient types — acute "weekend warrior" injuries, Medicare-age chronic arthritis patients, and complex chronic pain patients who've been through multiple providers without answers.
- Her toolkit spans conservative-to-advanced options: epidural steroid injections, shockwave therapy, PRP, radiofrequency ablation, and neuromodulation (spinal cord and peripheral nerve stimulation).
- She's building the practice herself from the ground up right now — EMR configuration, IT and X-ray-room construction, payer credentialing, and hiring — and documents the process on Instagram at @dr.cindytiu.
- No one else in her family is in medicine; she credits a college ACL tear and rehab experience, plus two mentors during training, with pointing her toward this specialty.
From a Torn ACL to Physiatrist
Dr. Tiu's path into medicine started on a tennis court. She tore her ACL during college tennis and went through the rehabilitation process herself — an experience she said was "kind of detrimental" at the time but ultimately shaped how she thinks about care. "Going through the rehabilitation and getting back to life was such an important focus," she said, "and having the right team around me and healthcare professionals to get me back there was vital."
No one else in her family works in medicine — her siblings are in finance and business, and she was explicit that she didn't grow up in a household pushing her toward "doctor, lawyer" as the only acceptable paths. "I just always knew I wanted to be a doctor of some sort," she said, calling the realization difficult to explain but longstanding. She chose Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation specifically because, unlike specialties tied to one body part, physiatrists treat function across the whole musculoskeletal and neurologic system — from sports injuries to traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, and stroke.
Why Interventional Pain, Specifically
Two mentors shaped her decision to subspecialize in interventional pain. Dr. Omar Salad, a physician in the Fort Worth area, gave her its first real introduction during medical school. Later, shadowing a PM&R pain physician she calls "Dr. Fox," she watched a patient walk out of an appointment with visible relief — "tears in their eyes... their pain was better" — and knew immediately she wanted to be the one delivering that outcome.
Interventional pain also fit a more practical need: she wanted a specialty that combined ongoing patient relationships with hands-on procedural work. An early general-surgery rotation attending told her she had "the best hands I've seen in a long time," feedback she heard again through training. But a purely clinic-based specialty like psychiatry, she said, "I definitely could not do." Interventional pain let her keep both — seeing patients in clinic and treating them procedurally, with what she called tangible, often immediate changes.
"I didn't feel like I had the freedom to really treat patients the way that I envisioned treating them."
— Dr. Cindy Tiu, on why she left employed practiceThe Leap: Leaving Employed Medicine
After her fellowship, Dr. Tiu spent two years as an employed physician — experience she called valuable but limiting. Quoting a line from Mark Cuban about being "the worst employee" because he always thinks he can do something better, she described feeling the same tension: doing good work without the control to shape how she delivered it. Opening Artisan Interventional Pain only two years out of fellowship was, in her words, "a pretty big leap of faith" — but one she'd been envisioning since residency.
She was candid that the decision isn't just professional. "It's definitely not about the money," she said, pointing instead to the autonomy of setting her own schedule and pace as she also plans to grow her family. That flexibility, she said, is "the other beauty of entrepreneurship."
Three Kinds of Patients She Sees
Dr. Tiu described her patient base in three broad groups. The first is the "weekend warrior" — someone with an acute strain or a herniated disc causing sciatica down the leg, often treated with an epidural steroid injection alongside regenerative options like shockwave or PRP. The second is her Medicare-age patients with chronic arthritis in the knees, shoulders, or back, where radiofrequency ablation and spinal cord stimulation come into play. The third, and the group she finds most rewarding to work with, is complex chronic pain patients who've already seen multiple providers and specialists without a clear answer — patients where her broad interventional-pain training gives her more tools to look for alternatives.
Her Philosophy: Function First
Rather than asking "how can I bring your pain scores down," Dr. Tiu said she starts by asking what the pain is preventing a patient from doing, and works backward from there. She favors starting conservative and escalating only as needed, and was direct about not wanting to over-prescribe: "that's one of the myths... you're a pain doctor, you prescribe [narcotics]. Well, that's far from what we want to do." She also pushed back on what she called "factory" medicine — rushed five-minute visits and patients bounced between providers with no continuity of care. Her stated goal for Artisan: "a place where you would want to take your family member."
Inside the Toolkit: Shockwave, PRP & Spinal Cord Stimulation
Shockwave therapy uses electrohydraulic forces to reach deep into tissue and tendons, increasing blood flow and prompting what Dr. Tiu called "cellular response technology" — cellular regeneration that can bring relief within minutes. She plans to offer a package of ten treatments after an initial session, and to combine it with PRP when appropriate — sometimes using shockwave first to calm acute inflammation before layering in PRP.
PRP (platelet-rich plasma) involves drawing a patient's own blood, centrifuging it to isolate the plasma, and injecting it around tendons or joints to bring regenerative, anti-inflammatory activity to the area. She was upfront that it can cause a short-term flare of pain before it helps, with results building over weeks to months — she pointed to a friend referred to a sports-medicine colleague whose elbow and ankle pain resolved to "100% better" six months after treatment.
For neuropathic pain, she described neuromodulation — an umbrella term covering spinal cord stimulation and peripheral nerve stimulation. Spinal cord stimulation places thin wires (about the thickness of a pen tip) in the epidural space behind the spinal cord, connected to a small battery implanted under the skin, similar to a pacemaker. It's used for pain radiating down the leg after back surgery, and can be positioned near the neck to treat arm and shoulder pain. Peripheral nerve stimulation extends the same concept further from the spine — from the dorsal root ganglion out to spinal nerves and targets like the elbow or armpit — and is less invasive. On why she prefers regenerative options over nerve ablation when possible, she said: "taking away pain by destroying nerves is probably worse than bringing in something to help use your own body's [cells] to help regenerate the area."
Building Artisan From Scratch
Much of the conversation covered the unglamorous mechanics of opening an independent practice. Dr. Tiu is currently configuring her electronic medical record system — critical, she noted, because a physician's documentation directly determines insurance coding and reimbursement, which can take two to three months to arrive. She's also coordinating IT infrastructure and cabling, and construction on her office: framing is in, drywall isn't yet, and her procedure room will get lead lining to support X-ray-guided (fluoroscopic) and ultrasound-guided injections.
Payer credentialing has been slow — she'd secured two major insurance contracts at the time of this conversation, with more in progress, a process she said can take months per payer. She's been building referral relationships with other local physicians over meals, and had just held a video meet-and-greet with her first three hired staff members. She said she wants a workplace built on mutual respect and openness to new ideas as the team grows through inevitable early bumps.
She uses AI tools day-to-day to speed up the unglamorous parts of starting a business — from basic legal-entity questions to bookkeeping and vendor comparisons — while stressing she still verifies anything important rather than taking it at face value.
Credentials & Training
- BS, University of Texas at Dallas
- DO, Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine, Fort Worth, TX
- Residency, Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX
- Fellowship, Interventional Pain Medicine, Case Western Reserve University / University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, Cleveland, OH
- Double Board Certified: Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Pain Medicine
About Artisan Interventional Pain
- Founder & physician: Dr. Cindy Tiu, DO
- Practice focus: epidural steroid injections, shockwave therapy, PRP, radiofrequency ablation, spinal cord stimulation, peripheral nerve stimulation
- Location: 7000 W Plano Parkway, Suite 210, Plano, TX 75093
- Serving: Plano, Frisco, McKinney, Prosper, Celina, and the wider North Dallas area
- Opening: October 2026
- Phone: (469) 213-0282 · Email: info@artisanpain.com
Learn more or get in touch: artisanpain.com · Instagram @dr.cindytiu
