Some people have severe chronic pain that even the most advanced treatments fail to resolve. If you’re one of them, you could benefit from Metro Anesthesia & Pain Management’s experience in spinal cord stimulation. At their offices in West Des Moines and Des Moines, Iowa, the skilled pain management specialists perform trials to ensure the treatment works before performing full implantation. To see if spinal cord stimulation could ease your pain, call Metro Anesthesia & Pain Management today or book an appointment using the online form.
Spinal cord stimulation can help patients with severe, chronic pain in their back, legs, neck, or arms.
The treatment involves your Metro Anesthesia & Pain Management provider implanting a small device like a pacemaker under your skin. This implantable pulse generator (IPG) produces electrical signals that travel along wires into your spinal nerves.
The electrical impulses interfere with the pain messages these nerves send to your brain. Some spinal cord stimulators replace the feelings of pain with a tingling sensation called paresthesia. Others simply block the pain signals.
Metro Anesthesia & Pain Management offers various types of spinal cord stimulation. They use state-of-the-art spinal cord stimulators from leading companies like Abbott, Boston Scientific, and Nevro®.
Most patients with chronic pain never need a spinal cord stimulator because there are many less invasive options. However, some people have conditions that don’t respond to other interventions, even advanced treatments such as epidural steroid injections and radiofrequency ablation.
If you’ve got hard-to-treat pain in your lower back and legs or your neck and arms, you might be a good candidate for spinal cord stimulation. It’s particularly effective for conditions causing radiculopathy — pain, tingling, numbness, and weakness arising from nerve compression.
There are two stages to having spinal cord stimulation.
If you and your provider at Metro Anesthesia & Pain Management agree that this could be an effective option for you, the first stage is a week’s trial. Your provider places temporary wires in your spine and attaches them to an external stimulator.
Most patients undergo their spinal cord stimulation trials in an office setting. This saves money on co-pays and deductibles, and provides a convenient environment for you. Over the course of a week or so, you evaluate the treatment’s effectiveness.
If you’re pleased with the results and your provider is happy, you can go ahead with full implantation.
Although not a procedure to take lightly, full spinal cord stimulator implantation isn’t as invasive as having surgery. Your provider replaces the temporary wires with permanent ones. They attach these to the implant, which goes under your skin in a convenient place like your buttock.
You might feel slightly sore for a few days but should soon recover and enjoy the benefits of managing your pain.
If you’d like to see whether spinal cord stimulation could help with your treatment-resistant pain, call Metro Anesthesia & Pain Management today or book an appointment online.