Surgical Treatment For Back Pain
Sometimes there’s nothing else to do, and non-invasive therapy is not enough to treat the pain. In such cases, minimally invasive therapy and surgical treatments are contemplated to reduce pain and improve the quality of life. So, we can divide surgical treatment into two types: minimally invasive and invasive techniques.
Minimally invasive approaches try to address pain surgically while reducing the side effects. One of such techniques is lumbar facet joint intervention. This is basically intra-articular injections and nerve blocks followed by nerve destruction by radiofrequency. A more common approach is intra-articular steroid injections, but this technique appears to have adverse effects in some patients.
Epidural injections can also be considered in some patients, and pain relief is temporary but lasts a few months. Another minimally-invasive procedure is spinal cord stimulation. As the name implies, this technique delivers an electromagnetic pulse through a series of electrodes to numb the pain by modulating nerve transmission.
Of course, sometimes minimally invasive techniques are not enough to deal with back pain, especially when considerable structural damage is causing the symptoms. In such cases, doctors will have to try a more complex surgery to restore the spine’s structures.