Chronic pain starts when your body’s normal response to an injury persists for longer than it should. This pain makes your body lose protection from injury and becomes painful for you. Chronic pain might make working, eating, exercising, or engaging in other daily activities challenging. This leads to fatigue and results in additional chronic health issues, including weight gain, depression, and problems from using too many painkillers.
Your nerves constantly transmit signals from the body to the brain to alert you about a problem. In some cases, there is no injury, but the nerves still send signals to the brain. A spinal cord stimulator reduces pain by disrupting these signals.
Chronic pain significantly reduces an individual’s quality of life, making them uncomfortable, anxious, distracted, and sleep-deprived. It is one of the most occurring causes of impairment in people under 45.
Long-term pain can be reduced with massages, physical activity, and medication, but sometimes the pain still exists despite these therapies. When other therapies don’t work, a spinal cord stimulator can be your best bet for controlling your chronic pain. You can experience pain relief up to 75% after a successful implant.
What is a Spinal Cord Stimulator?
A spinal cord stimulator is a minimally invasive neuromodulation device implanted in the human body to treat chronic pain. It disrupts abnormal nerve activity in specific body areas and sends impulses to specific nerves and pathways.
What are The Causes of Pain?
There are various causes of chronic pain. Almost any nerve damage has the potential to develop into a chronic issue. This pain can feel vary depending on where the nerve damage is. Nerve damage may result from physical trauma, other medical disorders, or drugs.
Chronic pain may be brought on by medical treatment, uncontrolled diabetes, or a pinched nerve in the back. How pain is perceived and how well someone can cope with it is influenced by their mental health.
Because there are many possible causes of chronic pain, the diagnosis and course of treatment differ from patient to patient. It’s crucial to realize that various medical disorders, including arthritis and muscle or joint injuries, can cause a person to go through episodes of continuous acute pain.
When the initial cause of the pain is no longer there, the pain becomes chronic. The most effective use of spinal cord stimulation is for nerve damage which leads to chronic pain.
How Does Spinal Cord Stimulator Help in Reducing Pain?
Using a spinal cord stimulator help you live everyday life with chronic pain in your neck, back, or leg. The electrodes and generator in this device are used to reduce long-persisting pain. These electrodes are implanted in the spinal cord, where pain signals are transmitted to the brain.
Electric impulses go along the leads to stop the pain signals from reaching your brain. Therefore, you won’t experience any pain or only minor discomfort. The generator is placed underneath your skin, next to your buttocks, or along your belly. It produces impulses to block pain signals.
You can turn the stimulation of spinal cord stimulators on or off using an external remote control. Controlling the impulses is essential because pain signals vary.
How Does a Spinal Cord Stimulator Work?
Your doctor positions the electrodes near the specific region of the spinal cord, which is the cause of pain during neuromodulation treatment. These electrodes emit a low-voltage electric current that can stimulate particular spinal areas and promote the release of inhibitory neurotransmitters, preventing the transmission of pain-inducing neural impulses.
Although the precise workings of spinal cord stimulation are complicated, the procedure can be comparable to how a pacemaker regulates an irregular pulse.
A neuromodulation device can stimulate particular brain pathways that could help reduce pain-related symptoms. Chronic pain results from a combination of biological, psychological, and social variables, and its management often requires a multidisciplinary strategy.
In addition to impaired mental and physical function, patients with chronic pain often experience depression, sleep difficulties, and exhaustion. The neurological system undergoes long-term changes as a result of chronic pain.
The changes in the sensitivity of pain receptors in the brain are known as plasticity. Even when an illness or injury that caused the pain has been treated medically or surgically, the plasticity of the central nervous system can still cause persistent pain. Even worse, it can cause discomfort to spread to different body parts.
What Type of Chronic Pain can a Spinal Cord Stimulator Help You Manage?
Patients with chronic pain that previous regular or surgical therapy options have not treated are considered for spinal cord stimulation.
A spinal Cord Stimulator is used to treat the following problems:
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Painful refractory angina caused by peripheral vascular disease
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Complex regional pain syndrome and chronic pain after failing back surgery syndrome
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Back pain
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Heart pain, chest pain
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Spinal cavity injury
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Pain from amputation
Failed back surgery syndrome FBSS is when a person has undergone back surgery but did not experience adequate pain relief. Spinal cord simulator procedure is used to fix conditions with lower back pain like lumbar spinal stenosis brought on by a herniated disc or degenerative disc disease.
Spinal cord stimulation may be helpful for patients with perineal and visceral pain and painful diabetic neuropathy. It is essential to remember that each patient with one of these or other chronic pain problems should be examined individually to determine whether neuromodulation can be beneficial for them.
Consult a Professional Today!
Spinal cord stimulation has been used to treat several chronic pain problems. Advancements in technology and spinal cord stimulator cost efficiency have made this treatment a tempting choice for improving pain relief and general function in an individual with chronic pain.
A spinal cord stimulator may be the best option if you have undergone physical or surgical treatments, including exercises, massages, medications, and physical therapy but are still experiencing discomfort.
You should contact our licensed doctors in Los Angeles; our professionals at DrRogers can suggest spinal cord stimulation as the best option for managing your chronic pain.