Ajay Manhapra MD

Dr. Ajay Manhapra, MD, completed his M.B.B.S. degree from Government Medical College, Thrissur, India, and his Internal Medicine residency from Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit, MI. He was a practicing internist for over a decade. Then he completed the VA Advanced Inter-professional Fellowship in Addiction Treatment at West Haven VA Medical Center, CT, affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine. He has been a clinician, researcher, and scholar focused on helping people with pain and addiction for the past decade.

Manhapra is currently the Section Chief of Pain Medicine at Hampton VA Medical Center in Hampton, Virginia, and runs an interdisciplinary clinic that helps people with complex chronic pain and multimorbidity find a path to functional recovery. Dr. Manhapra and colleagues pioneered the concept of complex persistent opioid dependence/opioid-induced chronic pain as an explanation of the ineffectiveness of long-term opioid therapy and its deprescribing. Dr. Manhapra also advanced the treatment of ineffective long-term opioid therapy and failed opioid taper using buprenorphine-based pharmacobehavioral approaches.