Spinal cord stimulation is not very well known and it doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. But it is is basically a pacemaker for pain. I don’t know if we can see it here but it is a little battery that causes impulses that are taken to the spine through these wires. And they’re going to go to the spine. And they have an effect, a very subtle effect, on the nerves that are going into the brain from the back, for example.
It can also be down in the neck and the mid-back. It can alleviate the pain that is otherwise not responding to anything else. And beyond that it serves two major purposes: avoid surgery, particularly on patients that have disc lesions that produce mostly the pain that goes down the legs or down the arms, and also it can rescue patients who have persistent pain after undergoing surgery. As you know, spine surgery has a high incidence of persistent pain after the surgery, and spinal cord stimulation can really help that. So patients who are looking to avoid surgery but they’re having pain – they had an injury and they continue to have pain – this is one of the alternatives that I can offer them.
Those who did have surgery and continue to have pain, this is many times the only choice they have. I think when a lot of people when they think of pain management, and myself included especially before I was an attorney, was they think of prescription drugs and pills and things like that. But this is completely different. This is more of a really get in there and help the person not so much cover-up with medicine. Probably the basic mission of interventional pain medicine is to avoid patients from being on chronic opioids. Call us for more information.
(Transcript from the video, transcribed but not reviewed)
