Control Your Pain

Have you had pain for more than six months? That means you are suffering from a debilitating condition known as chronic pain. Believe it or not, there are several types of chronic pain. The three main types are:

1. Nociceptive pain
2. Neuropathic pain
3. Mixed pain

Nociceptive pain is the pain most of us are quite familiar with. If you stub your toe, cut yourself, or get punched in the arm, you will experience nociceptive pain. However, if you have an injured nerve, you will experience neuropathic pain. Neuropathic pain has several characteristics:

• Not well-defined
• Difficult to treat
• Often causes severe disability

Examples of neuropathic pain include:

• Diabetic neuropathy
• Failed back surgery syndrome
• Complex regional pain syndrome (reflex sympathetic dystrophy)
• Spinal stenosis
• Post-herpetic neuralgia
• Occipital neuralgia
• And others

Often neuropathic pain is unresponsive to traditional medication treatments. Many of the medications used to manage neuropathic pain have significant side effects.

At Performance Pain & Sports Medicine, we offer an innovative treatment that involves no medications! This treatment has several amazing features:

• Minimally-invasive
• No medications
• No known side effects
• Provides you total control over your pain
• Instant relief rather than waiting for a medication to “kick in”
• Tricks your brain into thinking there is no pain
• Totally reversible
• “Try it before you buy it”

This amazing technology is called spinal cord stimulation and it is changing the lives of many chronic neuropathic pain sufferers for the better.

It’s critical that you have a physician that is expert at placing this device perform your procedure. The doctors at Performance Pain & Sports Medicine have a combined experience of 17 years’ experience with spinal cord stimulation and perform a significant number of procedures each year.

The procedure starts by scheduling an office consultation to discuss your pain and the options for managing that pain.

The next step is scheduling a trial procedure. This is completely temporary and reversible. It provides you full use of the device for a period of up to 7 days to determine whether the technology is appropriate for you. Should you decide to move forward, the device is implanted permanently.

The device has small “wires” called electrodes that deliver pleasant electrical impulses to override your pain. Here is a picture of these electrodes:

As mentioned above, you have total control over the device with this remote:

Let’s take a moment to compare spinal cord stimulation to the alternative, taking pain medications for the rest of your life:

With pain medications you get:

• Side effects
• Incomplete results
• Time to “kick in”
• Monthly visits to the doctor for prescription refills
• Requires urine drug monitoring
• Stigma of taking an opiate pain medication
• Costly
• Potentially lethal

And with spinal cord stimulation:

• No known side effects
• No known deaths
• Immediate relief when turned on
• No monthly visits
• No urine drug monitoring
• No stigma

If you’re suffering from chronic pain, schedule an appointment today to find out whether you are a candidate for this amazing procedure or one of many other procedures for managing and controlling pain.