Innovative Solutions for Chronic Back Pain: What Interventional Pain Specialists Recommend

You feel like you’ve become a prisoner to your back pain, which has severely limited what you’re able to do and, as the name suggests, is causing you more than a little discomfort. Of the 39% of Americans who struggle with back pain, about 16 million adults in the United States have chronic and severe back pain that’s preventing them from enjoying life as they should.

As a practice that specializes in chronic back pain, the team here at Apex Pain Specialists, led by Dr. Maziar Massrour and Dr. Naveen Reddy, is all too familiar with the devastating impact that chronic back pain can have on your life, and we’ve devoted ourselves to offering only the best solutions.

Below, we take a look at a few of the cutting-edge and evidence-based treatments that we turn to when patients come to see us to free them from debilitating back pain.

Front-line interventional injections for chronic back pain

Our top priority when you come see us for chronic back pain is to get you much-needed relief, as quickly as possible. A great way to do this is through interventional injections in which we combine pain-relieving and anti-inflammatory agents. Examples of these injections include:

• Epidural steroid injections
• Facet joint injections
• Nerve blocks

The goal of these injections is to provide near instant relief from the pain with a local anesthetic while the steroid component tackles the inflammation that’s pressing on the nerves, causing them to send pain signals.

Radiofrequency ablation for back pain

While interventional injections work well for relieving pain, they may not last all that long. A treatment that offers longer-lasting relief comes in the form of radiofrequency ablation (RFA). 

With this approach, we identify the nerve(s) that’s transmitting the pain signals to your brain and, using live X-ray, send a quick blast of RF energy into the end of the nerve, essentially cauterizing it.

When we ablate your nerve in this way, we prevent it from sending pain signals to your brain. Through RFA, we can provide you with months, if not a year or more, of relief from your back pain. If the nerve ending starts to grow back and signal again, we can repeat the RFA procedure.

Discseel® for disc repairs

If you have nerve compression issues due to degenerative disc disease (DDD) or some other issue that’s causing your disc to compress sensitive nerve roots in your spine, we offer an innovative and minimally invasive procedure called Discseel.

With Discseel, we can repair torn or damaged discs using only needles. For more information on Discseel, check out this recent blog post.

Spinal cord stimulation for chronic back pain

If you want to steer clear of medications entirely, we recommend exploring whether neuromodulation in the form of a spinal cord stimulator (SCS) might work for your long-standing back pain.

With spinal cord stimulation, we insert electrodes into the area of your spinal cord where your nerves are actively firing off pain signals. These electrodes emit mild electrical pulses that can disrupt the messaging, essentially scrambling the signals to stop the pain.

What you won’t see on our list of innovative treatment options for chronic back pain is spine surgery. As interventional pain management specialists, our goal is to bring you relief without causing more problems, which can happen with spine surgery.

If you want to figure out the best road forward for relieving your back pain, we invite you to contact our office in Chandler, Arizona, at 480-820-7246 or book an appointment online with Apex Pain Specialists today.