Few things can take over your life like back pain. The pain is bad enough on its own, but it also limits your activities and makes your world a much smaller place.
And too many people face this very problem. About 65 million Americans report a recent experience with back pain and 8% of adults report chronic back pain.
Because Pain Medicine Consultants is a practice designed to relieve common causes of pain, our team is well versed in the world of chronic back pain. Given how common this issue is, we pride ourselves on offering the latest techniques for relieving back pain, including spinal cord stimulation (SCS).
Let’s take a look at this innovative and long-lasting approach for managing chronic back pain.
To appreciate how spinal cord stimulation works to relieve chronic back pain, it’s helpful to understand the sequence of events that leads to your perception of pain.
Pain is created through communication between your peripheral nerves and your brain. The endings of your peripheral nerves, which are called nociceptors, register a problem and use electrical signals to inform your brain.
Your brain receives the electrical signals, which travel up your spinal cord, and interprets them to provide an appropriate level of pain.
The principle behind spinal cord stimulation is neuromodulation, a technique in which we influence the pain signaling. To do this, we install a spinal cord stimulator that emits electrical pulses that disrupt the pain messaging between your back and your brain.
There are many different roads to back pain, but nerve-related back pain is one of the most common and the most difficult to address. Much of nerve-related back pain stems from degenerative issues in your spine, such as spinal stenosis or degenerative disc disease.
When this is the case, the back pain isn’t going to go away on its own, and it’s often going to get worse as the aging and wear-and-tear processes continue in your spine.
As a result, nerve-related back pain can often take on a life of its own, making it tough to find solutions that are safe to use over the long term, which is where SCS comes in.
When you’re dealing with moderate to severe chronic back pain, solutions that potentially create more problems aren’t necessarily ideal, such as using opioid-based pain medications or resorting to spine surgery.
With SCS, we can take a different pain management path — one that’s far more sustainable and far less risky than painkillers and surgery. To outfit you with SCS, we only make tiny incisions through which we thread the electrodes to the vicinity of the overactive nerve endings.
To power the spinal cord stimulator, we implant a small generator pack just under your skin, usually around your abdomen.
This neuromodulation system offers key benefits in relieving back pain, including:
We can also easily reverse SCS if the treatment isn’t working. We can remove the electrodes and battery pack during a quick, in-office visit.
So if you’re looking for a long-term solution for chronic back pain, it’s probably time to explore whether you’re a good candidate for spinal cord stimulation.
To learn more about this innovative technique for combating back pain, please contact one of our offices in Pleasant Hill, Corte Madera, or Pleasanton, California, to schedule an appointment.
