Biography
A physiatrist's path from the
injection table to the seminar room
Vance Z. Johnson is a physician-scientist whose career has tracked a then-nascent subspecialty — interventional spine medicine — from its earliest days into formal recognition, and who now spends his energy building the people and the frameworks that will outlast any single procedure.
Dr. Johnson trained at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, where he served as President of the Student Association and earned the Wong Award for genuine Christian concern for patients, peers, and staff. He completed his residency in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation at Loma Linda — finishing as Chief Resident — followed by a non-ACGME fellowship in Orthopedics & Spine under mentors who were themselves pioneers of image-guided spine intervention, at a time when the subspecialty did not yet exist as a formal pathway.
Over the following two decades he founded and directed spine programs across multiple Inland Empire health systems, served as principal investigator at the Loma Linda site of several FDA-monitored device studies, and was a co-founder and lead signatory of the hospital that today operates as the LLUMC — Murrieta Campus. He participated in the CMS designation of Interventional Spine Medicine itself.
Since 2023 his center of gravity has shifted toward medical education. As Associate Professor at the California University of Science and Medicine, he has built a structured residency-pipeline program that has produced the largest single-school student delegations on record at national physiatry meetings — and, in 2026, a student-nominated Research Mentor Award.
He lives in Temecula, California, where — when not in clinic, the cadaver lab, or a manuscript — he tends an organic fruit-tree farm. He is married, with six children.
Physician-scientist · Temecula, California
Areas of Interest
Research interests
A program organized around a single conviction: that musculoskeletal pain is rarely just musculoskeletal — and that the metabolic, autonomic, and neuroinflammatory systems surrounding it are where the next generation of interventions will be found.
01
Cross-system mechanisms of chronic pain
Metabolic, autonomic, and neuroinflammatory pathways as modulators of musculoskeletal pain — translating mechanism into intervention for chronic pain rehabilitation.
02
Subspecialty Certification — Pain Management
Early clues for back pain, functional recovery, and the counterintuitive neuropathy that can emerge with concurrent opioid and GLP-1 therapy — building toward a guideline-oriented review for interventional spine practice.
03
Faculty development & professional identity
The CHER framework (Curiosity, Humility, Empathy, Reflection): a faculty-facing self-assessment approach to professionalism modeling in medical education.
04
AI-directed patient self-treatment
Identifying and characterizing patient-initiated, AI-mediated self-treatment encountered in routine practice — and developing intake screening instruments to surface it.
05
Autonomic dysreflexia & occupational health
Spinal cord injury, autonomic dysreflexia, and management frameworks at the intersection of rehabilitation medicine and occupational justice.
06
Digital therapeutics & neuromodulation
VR-based digital therapeutics for refractory chronic pain, nociplastic pain screening, and patient-initiated virtual-reality neuromodulation.
In Practice
Beyond the clinic
