What is interventional pain management?
The aim of interventional pain management is to minimize or, wherever possible, resolve chronic pain so you can get back to leading a life you enjoy. Your provider creates a personalized treatment plan that could include a wide variety of different approaches to treating your pain.
To further improve the results of your interventional pain management program, the Overlook PAIN + Recovery team also helps you make changes to improve your all-round health. That could involve activities such as losing weight, stopping smoking, using relaxation techniques, and finding suitable ways to exercise.
What treatments are used in interventional pain management?
Patients with chronic pain conditions typically start their treatment program at Overlook PAIN + Recovery with conservative approaches, which could consist of medication management, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and pain management techniques.
Your provider might also refer you for alternative therapies such as homeopathic medicine, acupuncture, or chiropractic. Cannabidiol (CBD) products could ease some forms of chronic pain. Overlook PAIN + Recovery uses im·bue botanicals™ CBD products and is licensed to prescribe medical marijuana.
Depression and other mental health problems are common in people who have chronic pain disorders, so psychological therapies and counseling can also be invaluable.
What if conservative treatments aren’t working?
If conservative approaches aren't giving you relief from your pain, Overlook PAIN + Recovery provides interventional pain management treatments such as:
- Epidural injections
- Trigger point injections
- Facet joint injections
- Facet joint radiofrequency ablation
- Joint injections
- Medial branch blocks
- Occipital neurostimulation
- Sacroiliac joint injections
- Sphenopalatine nerve blocks
- Sympathetic nerve blocks
- Dorsal root ganglion stimulation
- Spinal cord stimulation
Overlook PAIN + Recovery uses state-of-the-art technologies including advanced neurostimulator systems from Abbott, and Stimwave's Freedom Spinal Cord Stimulator (SCS), and StimQ Peripheral Nerve Stimulator (PNS) systems.
These treatments are all minimally invasive outpatient procedures that typically take no more than an hour to perform. Very often, you don't even need sedation, and the treatments cause little to no scarring.
The team uses digital imaging technology to guide these procedures, performing them with the highest precision and recording few adverse events.
What are the advantages of interventional pain management?
Interventional pain management practitioners like the team at Overlook PAIN + Recovery have the knowledge and experience to get to the root cause of your pain. That means they can treat what's causing the problem rather than masking it with medication.
As well as failing to address the cause of your pain, using medications like opioids has its own issues. This includes the risk of side effects, and the likelihood that the effectiveness of your medication decreases over time. There's also a significant risk that you'll develop an addiction to your medication.
Where a pain condition is incurable or the cause isn’t known (idiopathic pain), interventions like steroid injections, nerve blocks, radiofrequency ablation, and neurostimulation target the nerves generating your pain, reducing the strength of the pain signals.
Call Overlook PAIN + Recovery today to find out how interventional pain management could help you, or book an appointment online.
