Dealing with Chronic Pain? Learn About Minimally Invasive Pain Management Solutions

The numbers surrounding the prevalence of chronic pain in the United States are nothing short of eye-opening. To wit, more than 20% of the adult population reports problems with chronic pain, and this number could be as high as 40%, as not all chronic pain is reported. While solutions such as prescription painkillers or surgery are available, these remedies come with considerable risks. Bridging these two solutions, however, is a wide range of pain management techniques that are both effective and minimally invasive.

At Comprehensive Pain Management, Dr. Do Chan and Dr. Boris Shwartzman provide an extensive suite of interventional pain management techniques that allow our patients to regain pain-free movement. 

Whether you’re suffering from chronic lower back pain or fibromyalgia, here’s a look at just a few of the ways we can provide you with much-needed relief.

Blocking the pain 

If you’re struggling with chronic pain that originates in your spine or in a knot of muscles, we offer several different techniques that block the pain signals.

For example, radiofrequency ablation is a technique in which we use X-ray guidance to ablate the nerves along your spine that are responsible for sending the pain signals. Using only a needle, we target your irritated nerves with an electrical current that destroys the end of the nerve, disrupting the messaging between that nerve and your brain.

Another technique we use to combat chronic back pain is an epidural steroid injection. With this technique, we deliver both a local anesthetic and a steroid into the epidural space where the compressed or irritated nerve is located. The anesthetic goes to work immediately to dull the pain, and the steroid relieves any inflammation.

Using the same combination of a steroid and a local analgesic, we can also address facet joint pain in your back with our facet joint injections and muscular pain with our trigger point injections.

If you want a longer-lasting solution to back pain, we offer spinal cord stimulators, which are implantable electrical stimulation devices that interrupt pain signals.

Correcting the problem

If you’d like a longer-lasting solution to your chronic pain that goes beyond blocking or quieting your nerves, we offer several minimally invasive techniques, including:

The mild® procedure

If you have spinal stenosis, our goal is to create more space in your spinal canal, which we can accomplish with the mild procedure. Using this approach, we remove any ligaments or bone tissues that may be crowding your spinal canal and pressing on your nerves.

Kyphoplasty

If you have compression fractures in your spine, we turn to kyphoplasty to restore your vertebra to its original height and strength.

Disc-FX®

If you’re suffering from a herniated disc that isn’t resolving itself, we recommend the Disc-FX procedure, in which we need only a small incision to access and repair damaged disc tissue.

Lumbar micro-endoscopic discectomy

If you have a damaged disc in your spine that is progressively causing problems, a discectomy may be a viable solution. During this procedure, we rely on endoscopy to remove the damaged portions of your disc.

In each of the minimally invasive pain management techniques we outline above, we typically perform the procedure on an outpatient basis, which means you’re free to return home afterward.

If you’d like to learn more about the many minimally invasive options we offer for remedying your chronic pain, please contact one of our four offices in Attleboro or Franklin, Massachusetts, or South Kingstown or Warwick, Rhode Island.