Close to 21% of adults in the United States experience chronic pain lasting more than three months, with many of them suffering with spinal conditions.
Back pain can take over your life, making it harder to work, sleep, drive, exercise, or enjoy time with family. When pain lasts for weeks or months, many people start to worry that surgery will become their only choice.
At Advanced Pain Management, we want patients to know that back surgery isn’t always the next step. Minimally invasive pain management treatments give many people another path. These treatments target the source of pain without large incisions, long hospital stays, or major recovery time.
While they don’t work for every condition, they help many patients reduce pain, improve movement, and delay or avoid surgery.
Back pain can come from many structures in the spine. Discs, joints, nerves, muscles, ligaments, and bones can all play a role. You may feel:
Pain may stay in your low or mid back or travel into your buttocks, hips, or legs.
At Advanced Pain Management, we look at the full picture before recommending treatment. We review your symptoms and medical history, conduct a physical exam, and analyze imaging results when needed. We also ask how pain affects your sleep, work, mobility, and mood.
The correct treatment depends on what causes your pain, so a strained muscle needs a different approach than a herniated disc, spinal arthritis, nerve irritation, or spinal stenosis. Options include:
When something irritates a spinal nerve, it can cause sharp, electric, burning, or shooting pain that travels down the leg. An epidural steroid injection places anti-inflammatory medicine near the irritated nerve to calm swelling and reduce pain so you can move more comfortably.
Treatment doesn’t remove a herniated disc or reverse arthritis, but it can reduce the nerve irritation that causes severe symptoms. Many patients use steroid injections along with physical therapy, stretching, and activity changes.
Small joints in the back of your spine, called facet joints, help you bend and twist. Like other joints in the body, they can develop arthritis. Facet joint pain often feels worse when you stand, lean backward, or twist, and may cause stiffness across the lower back or neck.
Facet joint injections deliver medicine directly to the painful joint or nearby nerves. These injections can help confirm the source of the pain and guide the next treatment step.
The sacroiliac joints connect your spine to your pelvis. When these joints become inflamed or irritated, they can cause pain in the lower back, buttocks, hips, or upper thighs. This pain can mimic other spinal problems, so an accurate diagnosis is vital.
A sacroiliac joint injection places medicine into the joint to reduce inflammation and help confirm the diagnosis. If the injection eases your pain, we gain useful information about the source of your symptoms.
If facet-related pain keeps returning, radiofrequency ablation may help. This minimally invasive treatment uses heat from radiofrequency energy to interrupt pain signals from specific small nerves near the facet joints.
Radiofrequency ablation doesn’t affect muscle strength or normal movement; it targets the sensory nerves that carry pain signals from your spine. We may consider radiofrequency ablation for patients who respond well to diagnostic nerve blocks that confirm we’ve found the right pain pathway.
Relief from radiofrequency ablation can last for months. You can repeat the treatment if the nerves grow back and pain returns.
The Vertiflex Superion™ Indirect Decompression System offers a minimally invasive option for people with lumbar spinal stenosis. It works by placing a small spacer between the bones at the back of your spine, helping keep the space open so the nerves have more room.
For patients who haven’t found enough relief from conservative treatments like medication, physical therapy, or injections, Vertiflex can bridge the gap between noninvasive care and major back surgery. The procedure typically uses a small incision and doesn’t require the same tissue removal as traditional decompression surgery. It’s done in our office using local anesthesia.
Spinal cord stimulation uses a small, implantable device to change how pain signals travel to the brain. Before a permanent implant, patients usually complete a trial to see whether the therapy provides meaningful relief.
Spinal cord stimulation doesn’t cure the original condition, but it can reduce pain and improve function for carefully selected patients.
If back pain has limited your life, call Advanced Pain Management today at our Tucson, Arizona, office or at locations throughout the Phoenix, Arizona, area. You can also complete the online booking form to get on your way to benefiting from minimally invasive pain management treatments.
