The best bet to locate a pain management doctor is to go to your insurance website and find the list of providers that participate in your insurance plan.
Many PM doctors now won't take patients who strictly want to pay in cash, so using your insurance website or listing is your best bet to locate one that participates in your plan, no matter how crappy the coverage, in network is better than out, unless you have out of network benefits.
DDD is a misnomer- degenerative disc disease is not a disease at all- it is simply a state of being that our discs will dry out over time as we get older. Anyone, with or without back pain over the age of 18-21 will show some disc "degeneration" as they age.. In 90% of people, it is not considered to be a painful finding on MRI or CT scans. Most surgeons do not consider it a finding of any significance unless there are other findings that also correlate such as nerve compression or stenosis , herniations, or arthritis.
Bulges are simply when the disc is marginally outside it's normal location in the vertebra, again not necessarily a finding of any significance unless it is an extremely large bulge or is coming in to contact with a nerve root or the spinal canal- which would very rare and would then become a herniation.
I would at least give anti inflammatories a try for a few months to see if they in fact do help you reduce the inflammation, and help ease the pain. If after giving them a fair shot , and then finding that they don't help to reduce the pain, then try a PM doctor but I would recommend that you find a way to have an MRI done since most doctors want to see the actual condition before going further in the treatment standards above anti inflammatories and tramadol, since they have to justify the reasons for using opiates to treat painful conditions, they must have the documentation and test results to justify their ongoing prescribing.