Your life has become a prisoner to your back pain, and you’re tired of its unrelenting presence. If, like millions before you, you feel as though you’ve tried everything to find relief but the solutions haven't worked or they carry too much risk, it’s time to explore whether spinal cord stimulation might provide the long-awaited answer you’ve been looking for.
From back pain to peripheral neuropathy and many conditions in between, spinal cord stimulation (SCS) is helping people break free from dominating pain, and we’re pleased to offer these neuromodulation treatments at Glaser Pain Relief Center.
Under the direction of Dr. Jeffrey Glaser and Dr. John Zheng, our skilled team of pain management specialists offers SCS for patients who are looking for a meaningful and low-risk way to combat tough pain.
There are many roads to chronic pain. Let’s use one of the leading causes of chronic pain as an example: low back pain, which affects nearly 40% of adults in the United States.
In many cases, the pain is caused by nerve compression (a pinched nerve) in your lower back. Often, these conditions are degenerative and progressive, which means the pain is settling in for the long haul.
With tough conditions like these, you can try surgery, but back surgeries are only about 50% successful. You also could try opioid-based medications, but this is a potentially dangerous road to addiction — between 3% and 12% of people who use painkillers develop an addiction.
And these challenges are the same with many conditions that involve overactive nerve signaling, such as neuropathy or complex regional pain syndrome.
To avoid the pitfalls of traditional treatments for chronic pain, we turn to spinal cord stimulation. With this approach, we place electrodes into the area where the nerves are overactive, and these electrodes emit mild electrical pulses that interfere with the signaling.
In very basic terms, when you experience pain, it usually occurs when a nerve is irritated or damaged; this nerve then sends a signal to your brain. Your brain interprets the signal as pain, and so the communication goes between the affected nerves and your brain.
With a SCS, we interrupt this back-and-forth signaling with the electrical impulses, which garble the communications. Instead of pain, you might feel a sort of tingling sensation.
The process is relatively easy. We run you through a trial period first to make sure that spinal cord stimulation works for you. During this trial, we place the electrodes and you control the impulses via an external generator.
Should you experience pain relief during your trial, we take the next step and implant a generator just under your skin that will power the device for years to come.
Another aspect that we like about spinal cord stimulation is that you’re in charge of your pain relief. You can activate and control the stimulator using a remote that we program within certain ranges.
Unlike many other treatments, namely surgery, spinal cord stimulation is completely reversible. If, for whatever reason, you don’t want the stimulator anymore, we can remove it quickly and easily during an in-office procedure.
That said, we don’t perform this removal procedure all that often, as most of our patients find good relief from their chronic pain through SCS.
To determine whether spinal cord stimulation is a treatment option that can help you combat your pain, we invite you to contact Glaser Pain Relief Center in Encino, California, today to schedule a consultation and discuss an SCS trial.
