
When you endure chronic back pain, you may feel alone in your misery — but you most certainly aren’t! Some 16 million suffer right along with you each year.
Back pain puts a damper on your life. Along with the pain and discomfort comes limited mobility, which stops you from enjoying your favorite activities, whether gardening, walking your dog, or even performing everyday household chores, like standing and cooking.
Our provider team at Advanced Spine and Pain (ASAP) has extensive experience treating patients with persistent back pain, and we’ve enjoyed watching these patients recover and live with gusto again. Your ASAP doctor is your teammate as you make your journey to a pain-free life, and they treat many life-limiting conditions.
Spinal cord stimulation is a remarkable and comparatively recent advancement in pain treatment. The first stimulation technology was introduced in 1968. Today’s therapy capitalizes on your spinal cord’s ability to cancel pain signals thanks to programmable electrodes that we attach to your spinal cord to deliver low levels of electricity.
Once placed, you can control the electrodes via a handheld device and engage it when your pain ramps up. This treatment approach is a great option if other, more conservative steps, like medications, physical therapy, and pain injections haven’t been successful.
Another reason we like spinal cord stimulation is because it successfully treats a wide range of conditions that cause nagging back pain. Here are some of the most common:
Simply considering the diverse painful conditions that spinal cord stimulation treatment can successfully address is reason enough to deem it extraordinary.
A spinal cord stimulation system contains two main components: electrodes (thin wires) and a small generator. We place the electrodes between your spinal cord and vertebrae, and the generator goes under your skin near your stomach or upper buttock. A remote control enables you to send electrical impulses when pain arises.
You first undergo a trial procedure where we place electrodes along your spine in the area we think will work best. We determine the placement area with the help of X-ray imaging. For the next few days, you wear the generator around your waist and see if the system successfully reduces your back pain.
If the trial has a positive outcome, the generator is implanted for the long-term during an outpatient surgical procedure.
Spinal cord stimulation frees you from medication, is reversible, puts you in control of managing your pain, and restores your quality of life.
Call the Advanced Spine and Pain office that’s most convenient to you to schedule a consultation to discuss this advanced treatment or book an appointment online.