Four Signs of Compression Fractures in Your Spine
Between 1 and 1.5 million Americans experience spinal compression fractures each year in the United States. To help you recognize a compression fracture, here are some subtle and not-so-subtle signs.
When Spinal Cord Stimulation Might Be Right for You
Ongoing pain has a way of taking over your life, overshadowing everything you do, and you want to break free. You’ve tried a wide range of treatments and nothing seems to work, leaving you, understandably, frustrated.
The team here at Comprehensive Pain Management, including Drs. Do Chan and Boris Shwartzman, lives up to our name, and we offer a wide range of pain-management solutions that can improve your quality of life.
By way of example, here’s a look at a highly successful pain-relief technique called spinal cord stimulation. Read on to determine whether this treatment option may be right for you.
Spinal cord stimulation — going straight to your nerves
Spinal cord stimulation is an approach to managing pain that relies on neuromodulation, a technique that disrupts the pain signaling along your spinal cord. While spinal cord stimulation isn’t necessarily new — it was first approved by the FDA in 1989 — it now accounts for 90% of all neuromodulation treatments, thanks to its efficacy.
The concept behind neuromodulation is simple: We deliver mild electrical impulses into your spinal cord that help prevent pain signaling from reaching your brain.
To accomplish this, we use an implantable generator, which delivers the electrical impulses through electrodes that we place in the epidural space of your spine.
What types of pain a spinal cord stimulator can treat
The FDA first approved the spinal cord stimulator to relieve pain from nerve damage in the trunk, arms, or legs, but its success and low risk has widened its applications considerably.
Today, we use spinal cord stimulation to treat numerous conditions, such as:
- Treatment-resistant back and neck pain
- Failed back surgery syndrome
- Postsurgical pain
- Complex regional pain syndrome
- Phantom limb pain or amputation pain
- Spinal cord injuries
- Chronic arm or leg pain from peripheral neuropathy
- Arachnoiditis, membrane inflammation around your spinal cord nerves
If we haven’t listed your specific condition here, but you’re experiencing chronic or acute pain that isn’t responding well to treatment, please come see us so we can determine whether spinal cord stimulation might help.
Advantages of spinal cord stimulation
There are many advantages of spinal cord stimulation, starting with the fact that you don’t have to rely on pain medications.
Second, once we implant the spinal cord stimulator, there’s nothing you need to do, as we program the unit to deliver the electrical impulses. As well, we can adjust these impulses at any time.
We also perform a trial run before we implant the spinal cord stimulator to ensure that you respond favorably to neuromodulation.
If you want to explore further whether spinal cord stimulation might be the solution you’ve been looking for, please contact one of our offices in Attleboro or Franklin, Massachusetts, or South Kingstown or Warwick, Rhode Island, to set up a consultation.
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