Driving is becoming more difficult as you struggle to turn your head because of nagging neck pain. Or, maybe you find yourself hunched over from shooting pain in your lower back when you stand straight. However, your spine-related pain is showing up; you just want to find a way to move again without discomfort.
Well, you and the 84% of adults who experience lower back pain at least once in their lives and the up to 70% of people who develop neck pain at least once.
The good news is that Dr. Rajiv Sood and the team here at Spine & Orthopedic Center offer a range of interventional pain management solutions for spine-related discomfort. One option with an impressive track record in pain relief is radiofrequency ablation (RFA), and we review how this minimally invasive and nonsurgical approach works below.
There are many different roads to back and neck pain, but nerve compression along your spine is common. There are 31 pairs of spinal nerves and roots that exit your spine — 8 pairs in your neck, 12 in your mid back (thoracic spine), 5 in your lumbar spine, 5 in your sacral spine, and one pair in your coccyx.
When you come to us with back or neck pain, we first identify what’s causing the pain and which nerve roots are responsible for your discomfort.
Once we locate the overactive nerves that are sending the pain signals to your brain, we target them with radiofrequency energy that ablates, or burns, the end of the nerve, preventing it from sending out signals.
Instead of jumping into risky surgery to remedy your back or neck pain, we recommend that many of our patients first try RFA because it’s proven to be low on risk and long on pain relief. In fact, before we perform this procedure, we first locate the problematic nerves and administer a 24-hour nerve block to ensure that we’re targeting the right nerve.
If you find relief from your back or neck pain after this nerve block, we know we’ve got the right nerve fibers, and we can proceed with your RFA.
We perform your RFA right here in our office, and we don't need to use general anesthesia. Instead, we administer a local anesthetic and then we use fluoroscopy (live X-ray) to guide a hollow needle into position. Once the needle is near your overactive nerve, we thread an electrode through that delivers the RF energy. This energy heats the nerve fibers and creates a lesion that disables pain signaling.
In all, an RFA procedure takes us only minutes to perform and you’re free to go home afterward with very few limitations (we do ask that you take it easy on the first day and avoid strenuous exercise or lifting for a week or two).
As for how long you can count on relief after your RFA procedure, it's a hard number to pin down. Nerves can grow back, and they tend to do so within 6-12 months. That said, some people enjoy pain relief for years after their RFA procedure because their nerve fibers don’t grow back.
Whether it’s 6 months or several years, the small amount of time you spend with us getting your RFA done can be well worth your while as you get back to moving without pain again.
To explore whether radiofrequency ablation might be the solution you’ve been looking for for your back or neck pain, we invite you to contact our office in Jonesboro, Georgia, to set up an appointment.