After an illness, injury, or treatment from cancer or another disease, pain management is critical in the recovery process. The problems that come from chronic pain can be overwhelming in regards to everyday life and hinder the person from maintaining active rehabilitation. Without rehabilitation, the discomfort can turn worse.
Back Pain Create Complex Problems
When it comes to treating back pain, there are very few standardized approaches for diagnosing problems like there are for many other medical issues. And what diagnoses that are straightforward like fractures, infections, or spinal tumors for spine issues there is a controversy between specialists on how to treat them. So it is important for the patient to take an active participation in their diagnosis and their treatment for managing their discomfort.
A Trial And Error Process
Since no two individuals will experience discomfort in the same manner, how effective a particular therapy or treatment will be is different as well. Take epidural steroid injection for instance that is being administered for a herniated disc. Once patient may get instant relief from their pain and some people may not. This can be a frustration and hard to comprehend, but we’re each a different person. Each person with chronic pain needs to remember that it is sometimes necessary to try different treatments before the right one, or a combination of treatments, is discovered.
This can be a frustration and hard to comprehend, but we’re each a different person. Each person with chronic pain needs to remember that it is sometimes necessary to try different treatments before the right one, or a combination of treatments, is discovered.
Chronic and Acute Are Different
Chronic pain is different from acute type in the matter that the extent and the level of chronic pain don’t always reflect the extent of damage to the tissues. For instance, a person with a severely degenerated disc may not experience as much discomfort as another person. And those with very little degeneration of their discs may have severe pain. As such, the specialist isn’t able to depend on an imaging scan to determine what the cause of their discomfort is.
A Specialty
There are different types of medical professions like anesthesiologists, neurologists, and behavioral specialist like physiatrists. Each has specialized training through fellowships in pain management once they have completed residency and additional training.
A pain specialist that focuses on back pain could be a general doctor or an osteopathic doctor. They are a specialist on staff at a speciality clinic that knows how to manage and treat these discomforts. There are specialist spine surgeons that have a specialization in pain management. Their focus is spine surgery that will correct a problem like an anatomical lesion, but they will also perform a surgery to treat chronic pain. A typical surgery will sometimes include SCS (spinal cord stimulators) implant.
This type of treatment is a pump that puts pain relieving medication to the spine that relieves chronic pain. It is used when other therapy or treatments have not responded as well as needed or surgery didn’t repair the chronic pain. Other types of pain management treatments will include injections, medications, and prolotherapy