A system now offered by Freeman Health System provides a new approach to relieving lower back pain for those who haven’t been helped by other back pain procedures or have difficulty exercising.
The pain relief from ReActiv8 is accomplished by regrowing the lower back’s major stabilizing muscles primarily through the use of two little wires and a tiny battery pack, said Dr. Rebecca Sanders, a pain management physician for Freeman.
“People who have lower back pain who’ve had physical therapy, maybe they’ve tried medications and they’ve tried injections, and yet they continually have this cycle of severe low back pain — this procedure can help,” she said.
Lower back pain causes more disability around the world than any other condition, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to a recent survey, more than 72.3 million U.S. adults suffer from chronic low back pain. That’s a greater number of people suffering debilitating impact on quality of life than those who suffer from arthritis, diabetes or even heart disease.
Most lower back pain can be treated through physical exercise, medication or anti-inflammatory injections, avoiding ReActiv8 altogether. For some people, however, lower back pain can be crippling despite the long-standing treatments. That’s when Sanders will conduct an examination to see if a person’s stabilizing back muscles are doing their job. She’ll also order a magnetic resonance image of the patient’s lower back.
“On a normal MRI, you’ll see a nice gray muscle that looks healthy,” she said. For those with debilitating back pain, “their muscle has turned white, which basically means it’s died off.”
For years, she said, “we saw these (white muscle images) and really didn’t even have a treatment for it, so we really didn’t treat it,” meaning they prescribed stopgap measures like exercises and pain medication and needle shots. “People with chronic pain just became less active, they didn’t walk as much, and they just dropped their activities and enjoyment,” she said.
To regrow the lower back muscles, “we put in this little electrode, right on the nerve, and we program it to where the patient turns it on 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at night,” Sanders said.
“Let’s say someone has a bad episode of back pain, and so the brain tells this muscle that it has to protect itself and it’s got to stop working, so the signal stops from the brain. And then, without that signal, the muscle just dies off.”
So what they’re doing “is putting that signal back in there, and it regrows,” she said. “Isn’t that awesome?”
On the MRI, “you’ll see that white, saggy muscle — it’s just all turned to fat — and then after a while of being used, you can see a healthy muscle there.”
The process takes time, but “most patients will see pain relief in about three months.”
Even better, “studies have been done where they have followed people up to three years now, and the thing that’s exciting to me is we see people’s relief increasing each year,” she said. “This is one of the few (procedures) where the research has shown that after three years, people are doing better than they were even at a year or three months after the procedure.”
Sanders is the only physician in a 100-mile radius making ReActiv8 available to her patients, according to Freeman Health System officials.
“One of the big things that motivates me in my day-to-day practice is that I always see people that I don’t have good options for, so I’m always searching for what are the newer options, what are the treatments that can reach populations of people that traditionally I have not been able to successfully alleviate their pain.”
There is hope this muscle regenerative feature can be applied eventually to other portions of the body where aches and pains are common.
“I think definitely a big focus of medical research is regeneration; I think all of us, from doctors to patients … are no longer enamored with Band-Aid treatments. I know there’s a lot of efforts for regenerative treatments, and, while it may not be the exact same technology, it’s a similar thought process,” Sanders said.
from
https://clarkcountynewsnow.com/new-treatment-uses-regenerative-technology-to-combat-low-back-pain-joplin-globe/
No comments:
Post a Comment