SPINE
Do you have chronic pain that prevents you from doing the things you really want to do? Then maybe trying a Spinal Cord Stimulator Trial might help? It is one of the few procedures that you can actually try out first to see how much it helps you personally before you decide if this is the right therapy for you.
Spinal Cord Stimulation has been available since the 90’s, however, in the last ten years there have been tremendous advances. The trial phase is very simple. It is done with two wires inserted in your back and then taped to your skin connected to an external battery to mimic what the implanted system would do.
During this week long trial you would walk, shop, sleep and live your life with it and see how much better it was with it than without it. So if you suffer from chronic nerve pain you too might benefit from having a trial and testing it out to see if it could help with your pain as well. After all what’s the downside and in one week the dressing comes off and everything comes out in the office either way.
Spinal Cord Stimulation is one of the treatments that we offer patients at Ortho Rhode Island which gives them the ability to reduce pain and increase their quality-of-life goals. This is one of our main focuses, the whole person approach and we have found that using Spinal Cord Stimulation as a tool in this practice for our patients that have any of the painful conditions that they can benefit greatly from trying this therapy first with just a week-long trial. This therapy can help a wide variety of pain conditions such as post fusion, spinal stenosis, post herpetic Neuralgia pain, Chronic regional pain syndrome, phantom limb pain, diabetic neuropathy, arachnoiditis, spinal cord injury and lastly peripheral vascular disease.
The trial phase is just an epidural placement of two wires placed in the patient’s back and then taped with an external wire. We do that procedure under sedation in our Warwick surgery center. The patient then gets to experience a week of this therapy to see how much it helps with their type of pain. At the end of the week the patient comes back to the office, and we take the dressing off.
If the patient reports a significant improvement in both function, and quality of life improvement as well as decrease in pain then they most likely will move forward to the implant which is like a pacemaker device that instead of managing their heart it manages their pain control. It consists of two wires places in the epidural space under the skin in the middle of their back and then a small battery placed in the buttocks. Again this procedure is done under sedation in our Warwick surgery center. Patients then have a controller to adjust it if needed and also a charger to charge their device. This device is minimally invasive and lasts up to 10 years.
So as you can see lots of pain conditions that can be helped with this. Treatment starts with just a simple weeklong test drive to see if this could help with your pain too.
Come see Dr. El-Khatib and see if this treatment or other treatments he has to offer could help your pain today.
