Day in and day out, you try to find ways to work around the pain in your lower back, but your success is limited and you’re still in a world of discomfort. Making matters more frustrating, you’ve found that, so far, pain management solutions have been both short-lasting and ineffective.
There are many different roads to back pain — the issue affects nearly 40% of adults in the United States — which means there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. But getting the right diagnosis can place you on the right treatment path.
To illustrate this point, the team at Glaser Pain Relief Center, which is led by Dr. Jeffrey Glaser and Dr. John Zheng, is using this month’s blog to explain one particular road to back pain — vertebrogenic pain — and how we can provide lasting and effective relief with our minimally invasive Intracept® procedure.
Low back pain affects hundreds of millions of people around the world, and there are many different causes. Many of them boil down to degenerative and wear-and-tear issues in your lumbar spine, which is very much the case with vertebrogenic pain.
Each of the 33 vertebrae in your spine features plates on either end of the bony structure. These endplates form a barrier between your vertebrae and your spinal discs, and they contain blood vessels that deliver nutrients and resources to your vertebrae.
If there’s degeneration in your spine, such as with degenerative disc disease, which affects about 90% of people by age 60, it can lead to more wear-and-tear on these endplates. As a result, they can become inflamed and compress the basivertebral nerves that run through your vertebrae, which can lead to low back pain.
Vertebrogenic pain is often described as low back pain that flares when:
The pain is most often in your low back and stays confined to the area around your spine in the middle of your back.
When you see us for low back pain, we first spend ample time identifying where the discomfort is coming from. First, we review your symptoms and also discuss any pertinent medical history.
Next, we use advanced imaging to get a look inside. If we suspect that you might be dealing with vertebrogenic pain, we turn to the MRI, which is the best tool for identifying any degenerative changes in your endplates, which we call modic changes.
If we confirm that there are modic changes in your endplates, we will likely recommend the Intracept procedure.
During this procedure, we use real-time imaging to locate the basivertebral nerve that’s sending the pain signals to your brain. From there, we insert a thin cannula to create a channel to the base of the nerve we want to target.
Once the cannula is in position, we thread a probe through that delivers a quick blast of radiofrequency energy. This energy ablates the nerve, disrupting its ability to send pain messages to your brain.
The entire procedure takes about an hour. We place you under general anesthesia; once we’re finished and you’re awake and feeling OK, we send you home the same day.
There’s very little downtime after the Intracept procedure, and you should be back to your regular routine within a day or two. And that routine should be much improved as low back pain is taken out of the equation thanks to Intracept.
To further explore your options for relieving your low back pain, we invite you to contact Glaser Pain Relief Center in Encino, California, today to schedule a consultation.
