Dr. Ajay Manhapra was a practicing hospitalist managing complexly ill patients for over a decade before he made a career transition to addiction medicine and research. After a two-year VA-funded fellowship at Yale University, he started a primary care based clinic for patients with severe chronic disabling pain who have failed several treatment interventions. The clinic follows a whole-person approach to help these patients recover their functional life. In the clinic, they focus on multimorbidity as the main target of pain treatment, combining medical and psychiatric care, treatment of dependence and addiction, and polypharmacy management with behavioral treatment of pain. He also continues his research related to addiction and comorbidities through his affiliations at Yale School of Medicine and VA New England MIRECC.