pic

How Spinal Cord Stimulators Offer Drug-free Relief for Chronic Back Pain

How Spinal Cord Stimulators Offer Drug-free Relief for Chronic Back Pain

Working around chronic back pain is a struggle every day, and you want a solution that bridges the gap between invasive surgery and risky pain medications. Spinal cord stimulation might be just the ticket.

Each morning, you lie in bed and wonder just how much your back pain will interfere with your day — and some days are worse than others. This ongoing battle with chronic back pain is one that’s shared by up to 23% of the global population.

While knowing that you're not alone in your chronic back pain may be of some comfort, you’re more interested in finding a solution. Ideally, you want to find a pain management option that doesn’t go as far as surgery and doesn’t rely on risky pain medications. It might be time to research spinal cord stimulation. 

Here at Spine & Orthopedic Center, Dr. Rajiv Sood and our team have successfully used spinal cord stimulation (SCS) to combat chronic back pain in our patients.

In the following, we discuss why back pain is so difficult to treat and how spinal cord stimulation can reduce your back pain and reliance on pain medications.

When pain takes on a life of its own

Chronic back pain can be a frustrating condition to deal with for many reasons. First, over time, the pain can begin to take on a life of its own. Originally, the pain was your body’s way of directing your attention to a problem. 

If the problem is progressive and degenerative, as so many are in the back, it won’t go away, and neither does the pain signaling. At this point, the nerves continue to fire and cause more harm than good as your pain becomes its own condition or pathology.

At the same time, if you are taking prescription painkillers, you can build up a tolerance to these medications. As a result, you feel you need to take more to achieve the same pain-relieving effect. Unfortunately, this is an all-too-familiar slippery slope to prescription painkiller misuse and, eventually, an opioid use disorder. To put numbers to this threat, between 3% and 19% of people in the United States taking painkillers develop an addiction.A drug-free approach to managing pain

There are many reasons why more than 50,000 spinal cord stimulators are implanted each year, and the fact that SCS is a drug-free approach is certainly one.

With SCS, we use a generator and electrodes to deliver electrical impulses into your spinal cord, the primary conduit between your central and peripheral nervous systems.

These impulses are designed to disrupt the pain messaging between your hyperactive nerves and your brain.

Better still, you control the impulses — turning them on when needed and increasing or decreasing the frequency as needed.

Not only is SCS a drug-free approach to chronic back pain, but this therapy is also designed to reduce the medications you’re taking to manage pain.

If you’d like to explore whether spinal cord stimulation can provide much-needed, drug-free relief from your chronic back pain, please contact our Jonesboro, Georgia, office to schedule a consultation.