Don't Let Chronic Back Pain Hold You Back This Spring: A Guide to Spinal Cord Stimulators

Most days, you wake up and, before you even get out of bed, you wonder how much your back pain will interfere with your day. You’ve come to a point where it isn't a matter of if, but how much when it comes to your back pain, and you’re tired of the heavy toll it’s taking on your quality of life.

Chronic back pain is a common health problem in the United States — 65 million Americans report recent back pain and 16 million, which is 8% of all adults, report chronic back pain.

As leading experts in chronic back pain, neurosurgeon Dr. Ali H. Mesiwala and his team have made it their mission to find effective and sustainable solutions for back pain. Among our cutting-edge solutions, such as artificial disc replacement surgery, we also offer neuromodulation in the form of spinal cord stimulation (SCS).

So, if you want this spring to be a time of renewal, let’s work toward relieving your back pain. Toward this end, we want to spend some time reviewing the benefits of spinal cord stimulation for chronic low back pain.

Why low back pain can be tough to treat

There are several reasons why chronic low back pain is a leading disability around the world. The first is simple — your back is not only a major support structure, your spine is the main conduit that connects your central nervous system to your peripheral nervous system. This means that there are sensitive nerve roots (31 pairs, to be exact) that exit your spinal canal all along your spine, which is why symptoms can be so intense.

Second, a lot of low back pain stems from degenerative issues, such as aging discs and facet joint arthritis, and these changes are progressive and irreversible.

Third, medical solutions for chronic back pain can be problematic. Pain medications can open the door to even larger problems, such as a substance use disorder — more than 57% of painkiller users develop a substance use disorder.

So, given this tricky landscape, you can imagine that finding effective solutions that not only relieve your pain, but that don’t create adjacent issues, is the goal. And it’s one goal among many that spinal cord stimulation can meet.

How neuromodulation and SCS work

Spinal cord stimulation is part of a larger treatment protocol called neuromodulation, which is a technique in which we disrupt the pain signaling with mild electric impulses. Think of neuromodulation as a way to scramble the pain messaging between your peripheral and central nervous systems. 

To do this, we implant electrodes around your spinal canal in the epidural space where nerve fibers are overactive. Then we implant a small generator pack just under your skin that powers the electrodes.

Benefits of spinal cord stimulation

We’ve provided a basic explanation of SCS, and we’re happy to get into more detail when we sit down with you. Still, we want to cover some key benefits of SCS that our patients truly appreciate, such as:

• You control the level of stimulation with a remote
• There’s no major anatomical surgery involved
• SCS can reduce your dependence on pain medications
• SCS is relatively safe
• SCS is easily reversed

As for how well it works in controlling your symptoms, one meta-analysis reports that, “SCS therapies for treatment of chronic pain in back and/or lower extremities were associated with greater improvements in pain compared with [conventional medication management].”

It’s little wonder that about 50,000 spinal cord stimulators are implanted each year given these benefits.

So, if you’d like to learn more about this exciting approach to managing chronic low back pain, please contact one of our offices in Newport Beach, Marina del Rey, or Rancho Cucamonga, California, today to schedule a consultation with Dr. Mesiwala.