Each morning, you wake up and wonder just how much your pain is going to interfere with your day, and you’re tired of having your life dictated by your discomfort.
You’re certainly not alone in this prison of pain, as more than one in five adults in the United States reports chronic pain. Worse still, slightly more than 17 million of these pain sufferers have high-impact pain that overshadows almost every aspect of their lives.
As you’re all too aware, the road to pain relief is often paved with solutions that come with unwanted side effects. Finding a cleaner solution could come in the form of neuromodulation techniques, such as spinal cord stimulation.
As our name suggests — Glaser Pain Relief Center — our team is focused on finding the best pain relief for each of our patients. While we offer a wide range of treatments, Dr. John Zheng and Dr. Jeffrey Glaser have found that neuromodulation can play an invaluable role in these efforts.
Let’s first review what we’re referring to when we discuss neuromodulation. At its core, neuromodulation is a way of manipulating your nervous system to disrupt pain signaling. To do this, we implant a device that emits mild electrical pulses designed to disrupt the pain messaging that travels from your peripheral nerves to your central nervous system.
The best example of this is spinal cord stimulation, a technique in which we implant the stimulator along your spinal cord where it can garble the pain messaging that’s traveling to your brain. Each year, physicians implant about 50,000 spinal cord stimulators, helping patients address issues like chronic back pain and neck pain.
Another form of neuromodulation is dorsal root ganglion stimulation, which is a more targeted method for relieving pain in your lower body.
In either case, we thread electrodes into the area where the pain signaling is active. These electrodes are powered by a small generator that we implant just beneath your skin.
Now let’s look at some of the benefits that our patients enjoy when we go the neuromodulation route, such as:
If you’re dealing with a chronic and painful issue that’s irreversible, and you don’t want to spend your life taking potentially addictive opioid-based pain medications, neuromodulation can be a life-changing option. This approach to pain management can reduce your pain and your reliance on pain medications.
Before we implant a spinal cord or dorsal root ganglion stimulator, we conduct a week-long trial period. For this week, we outfit you with an external battery pack attached to temporary wires placed in the epidural space of your spinal canal to make sure that the neuromodulation is going to be effective in relieving your pain.
If the neuromodulation works, we can move forward and implant the device.
Once we implant the stimulator, you control the level of the electrical impulses with a remote, within certain preset ranges.
While most of our patients achieve good success with neuromodulation, they also like the idea that the treatment is 100% reversible. Should the treatment stop working, we simply remove the electrodes and battery pack.
There are many benefits to neuromodulation, and we see this approach to pain management only growing in the future. If you’d like to explore whether neuromodulation can play a role in your pain management efforts, we invite you to contact Glaser Pain Relief Center in Encino, California, to schedule an appointment today.
