At Apex Medical Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, we specialize in helping people who have chronic pain through treatment and pain management strategies. Our providers are experts who are familiar with all the ways that chronic pain can impact your life.
One treatment that many people aren’t aware of, but that is quite effective, is spinal cord stimulation. Here, we describe what spinal cord stimulation is and the situations where it tends to be most helpful.
Until fairly recently, medication was the first line of defense against pain. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), opioids, and antidepressants have all been used with varying degrees of success to treat chronic pain. However, everyone is different, so researchers can’t prescribe a specific combination or dosage and know that it’ll alleviate your pain.
Additionally, society has now experienced the unfortunate consequences of widespread opioid addiction. Though opioids certainly have crucial medical uses, treating chronic pain is often not a good one because there’s just too much risk.
All of this means that if your chronic pain doesn’t respond to conventional treatments or you can’t tolerate them for some reason, you may need alternative forms of treatment—possibly including spinal cord stimulation.
Your spinal cord is a large bundle of nerves that runs through the center of your spine. These nerves send and receive signals from all over your body, including pain signals.
When you have spinal cord stimulation, your doctor implants small electrodes in the space around your spinal cord. Those electrodes are connected to a control unit. The control unit sends short bursts of electrical stimulation to the electrodes, which disrupt the pain message traveling along your spinal cord.
The electrical current is very mild, and you can’t feel it. The result is that you feel less pain.
Not everyone enjoys success through spinal cord stimulation. Our providers only offer a trial when they think it could be helpful for you. Spinal cord stimulation isn’t a first-line treatment, meaning most people try other treatments first.
Before testing to see if spinal cord stimulation is likely to work, you’ll undergo a mental health evaluation and possibly counseling to make sure you understand what the device is and how to manage it. Then, you’ll have a trial, where electrodes are implanted and attached to a device outside your body.
The trial helps your doctor adjust the strength of the signal, and helps you understand what having a permanently implanted device would be like.
If you’d like to learn more about spinal cord stimulation and find out if it could be a treatment that may work well to help control your chronic pain, schedule an appointment at the most convenient location of Apex Medical Center.
