Beyond Pain Pills: How Spinal Cord Stimulation Delivers Lasting Relief

If you’re living with persistent, uncontrolled pain stemming from your spine, nerves, limbs, or a chronic illness, it’s time to see board-certified pain management specialist Dr. Okezie N. Okezie at Interventional Sports and Pain Management Associates. 

Dr. Okezie and our team offer a full scope of highly targeted pain relief procedures to treat a range of chronic pain conditions, so you can stop relying on pain pills — and attain the kind of effective, long-lasting, drug-free relief you’ve been seeking from the start.   

Here’s how one of those advanced procedures — spinal cord stimulation (SCS) — works to alleviate chronic pain and help you get back to your active life. 

When chronic pain is uncontrolled

Chronic pain conditions are as various as they are common: About one in four adults in the United States (24.3%) lives with some type of long-lasting pain problem. Most of the time, conservative care strategies like rest, activity modification, and physical therapy eventually pave the way toward effective relief.   

But for nearly one in 10 people with chronic pain (8.5%), the problem is severe enough to limit participation in work or daily activities. All too often, this is when people start to rely on pain pills to experience at least momentary episodes of relief. 

The problem with pain pills

Pain medication is a systemic treatment that temporarily changes how your body makes, sends, or reads pain signals. While “pain pills” can be an excellent short-term aid for acute pain problems, taking them routinely for a chronic pain condition can lead to:

• Tolerance, where your body needs an ever-higher dose for the same relief 
• Dependence, where you feel withdrawal symptoms if you stop taking them
• Addiction, which is more likely to happen with opioid-based pain relievers 
• Organ damage; your liver and kidneys can be harmed by daily pain pill use
• Stomach harm; some pain meds can cause stomach ulcers and bleeding 

Even worse, chronic pain medication use is associated with an increased sensitivity to pain that can leave you in much greater pain long-term. This can, in turn, trigger brain and nerve system changes that make the problem all the more persistent — and even harder to treat.    

Disrupting the pain signal pathway

Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) has one goal: To disrupt the pain signaling pathway so your brain doesn’t receive these problematic “nerve messages” and can’t translate them into pain sensations in your body. 

By effectively blocking pain signals before they’re received (and perceived) by your brain, SCS can deliver effective, lasting relief that gives you a way to significantly reduce, or altogether stop, your reliance on pain medications — for good.  

How spinal cord stimulation works

SCS is a form of neuromodulation that consists of a small device called a pulse generator, along with thin wire leads and a handheld remote. In a quick, minimally invasive procedure done under live X-ray guidance, Dr. Okezie implants the device just beneath your skin, with its leads positioned in the epidural space of your spine.   

When your pain flares up, you activate the pulse generator with your handheld remote, which has adjustable settings for customized control. The device stops pain by sending electrical pulses to the overactive nerve fibers, putting a form of “gate control” in place: 

• The electrical currents engage with the targeted nerves 
• The “busy” nerve fibers are unavailable for pain signals 
• Pain signals are displaced, and can’t travel to the brain

In other words, SCS is a lot like installing a gate that you can close at will to keep chronic pain signals quiet, contained, and away from your sensation-interpreting brain. 

Spinal cord stimulator trial

To determine if SCS will provide effective pain relief for your condition, you complete a temporary trial phase first. Essentially, the trial phase allows you to “test drive” the system using an external pulse generator for about a week, to see how your pain responds.  

A spinal cord stimulation trial is considered successful when it delivers a 50-70% decrease in pain; you may experience mild tingling, substantially muted pain, or no discomfort at all. 

Pain management results 

Recent research on real-world outcomes for SCS showed that over four in five patients (86%) achieved trial success, with over three in four people (77%) opting for permanent implantation. 

Within a follow-up range of three months to about three years, more than three in four people (76.6%) with an implanted SCS device maintained significant improvement and overall pain management control; pain medication use declined in most cases. 

Chronic pain solutions in Houston 

Severe, uncontrolled pain can be draining, disruptive, and damaging, but you don’t have to live with it. Whether you suffer from chronic lower back pain or neck pain, peripheral nerve damage (neuropathy), or persistent pain related to a recent car accident, surgery, or cancer treatment, SCS may be just the solution you’ve been waiting for. 

To learn more, schedule an appointment with Dr. Okezie at your nearest Interventional Sports and Pain Management Associates office in Humble or Baytown, Texas, today.