Fluroscopic Treatment for Your Back Pain

Healthy Times Staff

Back pain is one of humanity's most frequent complaints.  Even though it can be prevented, 80% of Americans will have it some time in their lives.  Acute back pain comes on suddenly and intensely, usually from doing something you shouldn’t be doing or from doing it in the wrong way.  The pain usually lasts a short while.  Chronic back pain is recurring; any little movement can set it in motion and for whatever reason, it lingers on and on for what can seem like an eternity. 

Rachelle, a 42 year old mother of two, lay on the couch with the cell phone and called her husband, “I’ve thrown my back out again.  This time it’s worse!  Much worse!  A knife of fire down my right leg!”  After three months of rest, medications and physical therapies, Rachelle still had intense pain in her back that shot down her leg several times a day.  She couldn’t enjoy life.  An MRI showed a 3-4mm bulging disc.  She was told, “…that’s normal for your age.  You don’t need a surgery for that.” and was dismissed to live with it.  She was not satisfied.  She found a Spine Pain Specialist.  After two five minute Fluoroscopic procedures her pain was fifty percent gone and she was finally able to get back into recovery exercises.  She learned about the cause and how to better care for her spine.  She got back to living life!

Some of the most exciting changes in health care have been recent advances in Spine Medicine.  Spine Interventionalists can now enter, examine, and repair the inside of the disc.  Patients who once had very limited options, i.e., open surgery vs. “live-with-it,” can now have outpatient fluoroscopically-guided procedures to reduce their pain or even salvage the natural disc and return them to function.

“It’s amazing what we can fit through a needle!” says Vance Z. Johnson, MD, medical director of YOUR PAIN CARE Clinic.  “We can place pain relieving medicine with accuracy, lace a spine catheter across a tear for repair of a disc, decompress a bulging disc, or place pain sensors in the spinal cord with an electric stimulator.  So much is accessible without a scalpel.”

“Matching the best treatment for the individual patient requires us to stay abreast of marvelous advances in Pain Medicine,” says Dr. Johnson, “along with careful creation of the patient-doctor team.”

Finally, there are two secrets that those with back pain do not know.  First, back pain is usually the symptom and not the underlying cause.  Second, pain killers cannot help the cause of your pain.  Drugs and pain killers block the message to the brain that your back is experiencing pain, which can delay the appropriate treatment of the underlying cause and lead to more damage.  Fluoroscopically placed medication does not mask the pain but instead leads to a better healing opportunity for your natural repair mechanisms.