Chronic pain can be a complex and difficult condition to treat. Not only are there many reasons behind the causes of chronic pain, but these causes sometimes make little sense, given our incomplete understanding of how sensory nerves function.
Pain sometimes persists long after the physical reasons for it have healed, one reason the team at Metro Anesthesia & Pain Management may recommend spinal cord stimulation as an alternative to pain medication.
Instead of masking pain with drugs that carry unwanted side effects, spinal cord stimulation (SCS) alleviates pain by changing the signals that sensory nerves transmit. SCS may eliminate or reduce your dependence on pain medications.
Let’s take a look at how SCS produces analgesic effects.
As a medical device, SCS systems have much in common with a conventional heart pacemaker. Like a pacemaker, SCS uses a low-level electrical signal to modulate nerve tissue behavior.
Pacemakers trigger motor nerves that control and regulate a patient’s heartbeat using an implanted generator and probe with external remotes. Overall, SCS systems use the same general components.
Instead of triggering motor nerves, however, an SCS device sends electrical signals that effectively scramble pain sensations.
SCS pulses create an alternate message that travels to the brain along the nerve that reports chronic pain symptoms. Your brain prioritizes the SCS signal and effectively ignores the pain impulse.
SCS isn’t a primary treatment for chronic pain. We recommend it to our patients who’ve exhausted other, more conservative pain treatments.
If you’ve reached the point where you rely on pain medications, including opioids, for symptom management without an expectation of your condition improving, it’s time to find alternative treatments. The side effects of pain medications make these unsuitable for long-term use.
SCS often proves beneficial when other treatments produce inadequate relief from a range of pain conditions, including:
Research continues on applications for SCS. Talk to us if you have unresolved pain related to other conditions to see if you’re a candidate for SCS treatment.
SCS implantation usually has two phases, a trial that tests how well SCS might work for you before placing a permanent system. In both, you have a pair of electrical leads carefully placed in a location that corresponds with the origin of your pain symptoms.
The trial confirms that SCS is the right therapy for you. You gain an insight into the amount of pain relief you can expect before committing to the permanent system implant.
An SCS implant is medically significant if it reduces your pain levels by about 50% or more. That’s enough to reduce your dependence on medication-based pain management.
Many patients experience more relief, but results can vary depending on the location, severity, and type of pain.
Contact Metro Anesthesia & Pain Management to learn more about this exciting pain relief therapy and whether you’re a good candidate. Call the office in West Des Moines or East Des Moines, Iowa, or book your consultation online today.
