The goals of interventional pain management are to relieve, reduce, or manage pain and improve a patient's overall quality of life through minimally invasive techniques specifically designed to diagnose and treat painful conditions.
OUR TREATMENT STRATEGY:
Treatment flow diagram used for low back/neck pain patients starting from least complicated to more complicated:
We start with the simple treatment and then go to the next step depending on patients response. Idea is to give the maximum option to the patient to improve with least to lesser complicated procedure before one decides for an open operation. Not that open operation is not good but it has own problems.
Procedures performed at our pain clinic:
Spine Procedures
- Epidural Steroid Injections & Selective Nerve Root Blockade
- Facet joint and Medial Branch nerve injections
- Radiofrequency Neuroablation
- Sacro-iliac Joint Injection
- Lumbar Provocative Discography
- Disc procedures-Ozone therapy, Disc Fx, hydrocisson
- In Post-spine surgery patients: Epidural adhesiolysis etc
Sympathetic blocks:
- Sympathetic plexus blockade – Lumbar sympathetic block, Celiac Plexus Block
- Stellate ganglion Block, Hypogastric Plexus Block
- T2,T3 Sympatholysis
Orofacial procedures:
- Gasserian Ganglion RF ablation
- Sphenopalatine Ganglion Block & RF ablation
- Occipital Nerve Block & RF ablation
Joint procedures:
- Intra-articular Injections
- Prolotharapy
- Visco-supplementation
- Peripheral nerve block
Advanced procedures:
- Percutaneous discectomy
- Racz Procedure (Percutaneous adhesiolysis or Neuroplasty)
- Spinal Cord Stimulation
- Intrathecal Programmable Pump / Spinal Cord Drug Delivery
- Percutaneous Vertebroplasty
No special preparations are required to do these procedures. These procedures are performed with the help of the needles, targeted to the problem site (not acupuncture). The problem site could be reached under X-ray (Fluoroscopy)/CT guidance confirmation and also by injecting dye around the problem area. Some procedures done under CT scan guidance. Almost all the procedures are day care and discharged the same day. Infact one can go back to work after most of these procedures.
Advantages:
- More options and flexibility for their pain symptom.
- Might need less or no medication for their pain symptom, so less side effects/complications related to medications
- As the required drug is many time injected at the site of pathology, it cause minimum/no effects on other body parts.
- This technique reduces the chances of undergoing surgery.
- Good options for the patients who are not surgical candidates according to surgeons/physicians or unfit for operative procedures or those who doesn’t want surgery.
- All above mentioned procedures are day cases except selected few like implantable stimulator or pump.
- Almost all of these procedures are safe. Complications are rare.
- Easy reproducibility because of minimally invasive nature of these procedures.
Give yourself a chance to enjoy your life by controlling your Pain and Improve your quality of life.
Chronic Pain is not a Symptom, it is Disease. Treat It.!
