Treatment for Your Fibromyalgia

Your chronic pain has taken on a life of its own, and it’s becoming harder and harder to relieve. Medications work to some extent, but you find you need to take more, and you’re worried about the risks of addiction. Or, surgery is on the table, but you’re not keen on the idea of adding to your pain.

If you thought you were out of options, think again. Here at Interventional Pain Center, Dr. Sachida Manocha takes great pride in offering a wide range of pain management solutions to our patients, which includes more out-of-the-box approaches, such as medical marijuana and spinal cord stimulators (SCSs).

In this blog, Dr. Manocha explains what spinal cord stimulation is and how it can provide relief from chronic pain. 

Mixing up the messages

The concept behind spinal cord stimulation is fairly simple. We use electrical impulses to disrupt the pain signaling between your spinal cord and brain. These low-frequency currents mask the pain signaling. The result is your brain either doesn’t register the pain signals, or, if it does, it responds with a tingling sensation.

Also called neuromodulation, our goal with this technique is to reduce your pain by 50-70% (or more), thereby reducing your need for risky medications.

Getting your spinal cord stimulator

Each year in the United States, 50,000 spinal cord stimulators are implanted. An SCS consists of three components:

1. A pulse generator
2. A lead with electrodes
3. A remote control

We implant the pulse generator just under your skin in your lower abdomen or buttocks. During the same in-office, outpatient procedure, we insert the lead with the electrodes into the area of your spinal cord where we believe your nerves have become overactive with their pain signaling. Then, we give you a remote control so you can adjust the strength of the spinal cord stimulator.

It’s important to know that we conduct a trial period before we insert the pulse generator to make sure the treatment works for you. To learn more about the SCS trial period, we recommend that you read this previous blog post on the subject.

Working with your spinal cord stimulator

Before we send you home, we program your pulse generator to levels and frequencies that we believe will work best for you. This means you’ll have a range within which to work.

When you’re home, you can control your SCS with the remote. This means you’ll be able to turn it on, turn it off, and, as mentioned, control the level of the impulses to address the level of your discomfort.

With spinal cord stimulation, your pain management is in your hands, giving you more control over your comfort. And should you need any adjustments, we’ll be here for you. We’ll closely monitor how the SCS is working to relieve your pain and make changes if needed.

If you’d like to learn more about SCS and see if it may be able to help relieve your chronic pain, we invite you to schedule an appointment online or over the phone with the Interventional Pain Center today. We have offices in Worthington and Newark, Ohio.