Archive for the ‘laser spine procedures’ Category
You May Get relief from chronic pain by walking
If you are suffering from chronic pain from fibromyalgia or another medical condition, you know the frustration that comes with the attempts to control pain. While medication and therapies are a key factor in pain management, exercise can also work to relieve pain and improve quality of life. Inactivity can lead to more pain – the more you move, the less you will feel your pain.
If you are suffering from chronic pain, begin introducing regular walking workouts into your daily routine. Walking is the most basic form of aerobic exercise. There are several benefits of aerobic exercise, including: building stamina, boosting energy and reducing stiffness and pain. Specific health benefits of walking for exercise include:
- Strengthening muscles – By strengthening the muscles in the feet, legs, hips and torso, you will increase stability of the spine. Spinal stability may reduce symptoms of chronic back pain.
- Improves flexibility and range of motion – With improved range of motion, you will be less susceptible to injury due to stiffness or awkward movements.
- Strengthening joints – A low-impact workout such as walking improves strength and flexibility of the joints, as well as muscles and tendons surrounding the joints.
Research has shown that low-impact aerobic exercise is most effective for improving chronic pain symptoms. It provides a means of relaxation for both the body and mind. Exercise in short intervals has been shown to be most successful in relieving chronic pain. For example, rather than going for one 30-minute walk each day, take three short, 10-minute walks instead.
In a study of 52 sedentary patients with chronic lower back pain, Dr. Michal Katz-Leurer and colleague Ilana Shnayderman found that a simple daily walking routine can improve chronic lower back pain symptoms. Katz-Leurer, from Tel Aviv University’s Stanley Steyer School of Health Professions at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, and Shnayderman, a graduate student at the Department of Physical Therapy and a practicing physiotherapist at Maccabi Health Care, published their findings in the journal Clinical Rehabilitation.
If you suffer from chronic pain, make a point to exercise daily. By exercising, you will help prevent muscle atrophy and decrease joint pain. Start with a simple 30-minutes of exercise each day, gradually increasing if you are able.
Consult with your physician before beginning any exercise routine.
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Herniated Disk in the Lower Back
Sometimes called a slipped or ruptured disk, a herniated disk most often occurs in your lower back. It is one of the most common causes of low back pain, as well as leg pain (sciatica).
Between 60% and 80% of people will experience low back pain at some point in their lives. A high percentage of people will have low back and leg pain caused by a herniated disk.
Although a herniated disk can sometimes be very painful, most people feel much better with just a few weeks or months of nonsurgical treatment.
Your spine is made up of 24 bones, called vertebrae, that are stacked on top of one another. These bones connect to create a canal that protects the spinal cord.
Five vertebrae make up the lower back. This area is called your lumbar spine.
Other parts of your spine include:
Spinal cord and nerves. These “electrical cables” travel through the spinal canal carrying messages between your brain and muscles.
Intervertebral disks. In between your vertebrae are flexible intervertebral disks. They act as shock absorbers when your walk or run.
Intervertebral disks are flat and round, and about a half inch thick. They are made up of two components:
- Annulus fibrosus. This is the tough, flexible outer ring of the disk.
- Nucleus pulposus. This is the soft, jelly-like center of the disk
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Dallas Spine Pain Center, Spine Pain Help Dallas, Dallas Spine Pain Doctors
If you are looking for a specialist in spine surgery, Dallas may be your next destination. BecomePainFree.com’s Dallas office provides:
- A free MRI or CT scan evaluation by medical staff
- Partner physicians board-certified in interventional pain management
- Free educational back pain seminars
- One of the top surgical facilities in the country
Free MRI or CT scan evaluation. Have you tried conservative therapies for your chronic back pain, and wonder if a medical procedure is the next best step? Allow our staff to evaluate your medical case. Our physicians will provide the most conservative recommendation deemed appropriate for your special case.
Free medical referral service. If you choose, your assigned patient coordinator will handle the logistics for any medical procedure recommended by one of our physicians.
Board-certified physicians. Our Dallas-based specialists collectively provide expertise in neurosurgery and interventional pain management, and provide a range of procedures, from epidural steroid injections to spinal fusion. They are unique providers of the BecomePainFree.com procedure.
Free back pain seminar. BecomePainFree.com’s Dallas office provides regular educational seminars so chronic pain sufferers can learn about the BecomePainFree.com procedure and talk directly to someone who can answer all of their questions.
Surgical facility. Victory Medical Center in Plano, TX is one of the newest surgical facilities in Dallas-Fort Worth.
Located in the center of the United States, the Dallas laser spine center also provides a convenient option for chronic back pain sufferers across the country – just a short plane-ride away. BecomePainFree.com’s Dallas office has partnered with the Hyatt Place, for traveling patients.
The BecomePainFree.com headquarters is also in Dallas TX. So when you visit, make sure to say hello to the patient coordinator and insurance teams, who strive to help patients like you find a solution for their pain.
Address:
13601 Preston Road, Suite E575
Dallas, TX 75240
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About us: BecomePainFree.com provides patient advocacy for spine pain sufferers. Patient care may be described as a table with patients on one side looking for a solution, and physicians on the other side providing a service; since BecomePainFree.com does not practice medicine, it is uniquely positioned on the patient’s side of the table, providing a compass to navigate the often confusing world of spine surgery and interventional pain management.
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Dallas skyline (Photo credit: dherrera_96)
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San Antonio Spine Surgeon, San Antonio Back Doctor, Mayo Clinic Trained Spine Surgeon, Bexar County Orthopedic Surgeon
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Spine Surgeon Dallas, Mayo Clinic Trained Spine Surgeon, Back Doctor, Spine Pain Doctor
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Pain Prevention
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Once you encounter back or neck pain, you are four times as likely to experience it again. This is why prevention is essential to your long-term recovery.
One of the best ways to avoid back pain is by exercising and stretching. Low-impact aerobics, such as walking or swimming, is an ideal way to prevent or treat back pain. Stop if the exercise becomes painful, and always remember to stretch. Stretching is easy to incorporate into your daily routine. You can even do it in front of the television.
Below are some more specific ways to prevent back or neck injuries:
The spine likes movement. Anything that puts the spine in a static position creates stress, which can cause back and neck pain. Every hour, stand, walk around, bend, arch backward gently, and twist. Doing so at regular intervals will lengthen the amount of time you can sit comfortably. Also, get an ergonomically-designed chair or an orthopedic insert to support your spine, espe
cially if your job involves long periods of sitting. Or roll up a towel, and place it behind your low back.
Prolonged standing can also strain the back. If you have to stand for long periods of time, prop one foot on a small stool or telephone book to reduce stress in the low back. Alternate with the other foot. Every half hour, bend over and touch your toes, with your knees slightly bent, or do some of the stretching exercises shown in the Seton Spine and Scoliosis website. They will help loosen your muscles, ligaments and joints.
While traveling on a plane, it helps to raise your feet on a briefcase or a bag underneath the seat in front of you. Ask for a pillow to place behind your low back to improve lumbar support. It is important to get up frequently and walk to the bathroom and back, whenever possible. Avoid hour-long periods in your seat.
Avoid sleeping on your stomach, which arches your back and puts pressure on your spine. Instead, lie on your back with a small pillow tucked under your knees. This position unloads the spine. An alternate position is to lie on your side with a pillow between your knees. If you like sleeping on your stomach, place a soft, flat pillow under your stomach to eliminate some of the arch that can stress your back.
Mattress considerations
It is important to sleep on a mattress with optimal back support, whether it is a conventional mattress or a waterbed. Older waterbeds were mushy and provided little support. However, now there are waterbeds that allow you to adjust their firmness. A good mattress should relate to your body shape. Generally, go with what feels comfortable to you.
Pain is a signal from the body to the brain that something is wrong. Either the back is too weak, too inflexible, or the wrong body mechanics were used to perform a task.
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A new hope for back pain sufferers?
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(CBS News) Back pain is one of the most common of human complaints, which is why new treatments in the works are raising so many hopes. Our Sunday Morning Cover Story is reported now by Martha Teichner:
Consider the human spine, in all its glory.
The 24 vertebrae, cushioned by gelatinous discs . . . the little facet joints that help make your back flexible . . . all the ligaments and muscles and nerves.
The spine’s elegant complexity is a miracle of engineering, or a curse when something goes wrong.
Eight out of ten Americans will experience debilitating back pain sometime in their lives.
“My pain was very excruciating,” said Lenda. “I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t bend over. I couldn’t lie down.”
“I’d say, ‘Oh Lord, can’t you help my back, it does hurt bad’ – he didn’t help me a bit,” said Leila.
And the most common culprit?
“I think most people would think it’s the inter-vertebral discs, whether it’s herniated or whether it’s just worn and arthritic and associated with pain,” said Dr. Augustus White, a professor at Harvard Medical School. He has literally written the book on lower back pain.
He says the easiest way to understand a herniated disc is to think of a jelly doughnut: When what Dr. White calls “the jelly” gets squeezed out, it presses on nerves, which can mean excruciating pain. Barring serious illness, the first line of treatment may not be what the patient (who only wants a quick fix) wants to hear.
“You need to make sure the patient doesn’t have tumor or infection,” said Dr. White, “but once you rule those out, you can be confident that you’re not going to harm the patient by saying, ‘OK, give yourself four to six weeks.'”
Believe it or not, 90 percent of disc injuries heal themselves after a few weeks, especially with physical therapy. But waiting it out can be torture, and not everybody gets better. So that’s where surgery comes in.
More than 1.2 million Americans undergo spinal surgery each year. That’s more than TRIPLE the number of coronary by-pass surgeries (415,000), and nearly FOUR TIMES the number of hip replacements (327,000).
Approximately 300,000 of those back surgeries were spinal fusions, where vertebrae are joined surgically so they can’t move. They’re often held in place, permanently, with metal screws or rods.
For many patients, surgery is the only answer – salvation. But for all too many others, it can be a nightmare.
Which brings us to Dr. Kevin Pauza, a founder of the Texas Spine and Joint Hospital in Tyler, Texas.
“I spent decades treating patients who’ve had surgery, the surgery was fusions,” Dr. pauza said. “Patients would do well for a year or two, and they’d always come to me and need more help.”
In his experience, fusion was usually the wrong answer: “The spine’s made to be a structure that bends with every movement we make, and if we immobilize a segment of the spine, the adjacent segment breaks down. That’s known as the domino effect.
“So my thought was, can we do something to that disc so that we don’t have to fuse it? Can we bring the disc back to life?”
And that’s the headline of this story. Just imagine: A procedure that repairs and re-grows discs, that doesn’t involve spinal fusion, that’s no more than minimally invasive, outpatient surgery.
The inspiration came to him when he thought about something as basic as how an ordinary cut heals.
“I realized what heals a cut is something that’s very simple: It’s two products that are in you and I, they’re in everybody.”
In our blood plasma – they’re called thrombin and fibrinogen. For the cut to heal, the two components come together, and they make a substance called fibrin.
When the two components, in concentrated form, are injected into the disc through a kind of squirt gun Pauza invented, just like epoxy glue, they combine and become fibrin.
Injected into the damaged disc, the compound acts like a sealant, filling cracks and crevices, and eventually allowing the disc to re-grow. “It allows our degenerated disc to turn into a young, healthy, normal disc,” said Dr. Pauza.
Rusty Templeton is typical of Dr. Pauza’s failed fusion patients. He had his surgery in 2008, but the pain came back and was agonizing.
“I’ve kind of damaged the disc above and below my fusion, and of course that fusion disc is also in pretty bad disrepair,” said Templeton.
Templeton is given a local anesthetic. The procedure takes about five minutes…there’s no incision..no hardware…
Typically, at first, patients feel discomfort. “Some patients even say, ‘Gosh, I wish I never had this done,'” said Dr. Pauza. “And then several weeks later, the patients just turn a corner. We tell them that they can expect that there will be one day where they have pain, and the next day, it’ll just stop.”
Dr. Pauza is hoping for Food and Drug Administration approval of the procedure by 2015, and to make it available to the public shortly thereafter. Phase III clinical trials are underway now at 20 sites around the U.S.
Dr. Pauza has successfully treated more than a thousand patients in his private practice. “We started treating the first patients approximately five or six years ago, and the success rate is approximately 86 percent,” he said.
So how did Rusty Templeton do? “My pain before was at least a ten,” he said. And two months after the procedure? “It’s still around a five, because I have underlying issues. But I can lay down now. I can, you know, walk around. I can drive where I couldn’t drive before.
“The pain level I had before the procedure was probably around anywhere from about a six to worse, eight,” he said.
Christopher Joseph is a home restorer who was in a car accident. How was his pain two months after the procedure? “Right now, it’s at zero.”
Dr. Michael DePalma is a spine specialist in Richmond, Va. The North American Spine Society has just published his paper on the latest experimental therapies involving disc restoration.
“Stem cells are something that’s being investigated to replenish cells within the disc directly, injecting growth factors, which are proteins, to try to stimulate repair in a disc have also been evaluated,” said Dr. DePalma.
He is involved in 4 different FDA trials of the new procedures and believes these so-called biologics are the future of back treatment. Based on the results so far, he thinks Dr. Pauza’s fibrin sealant offers the most promise.
If the treatment, asked Tecihner, is even 50% successful with someone, is that significant? Dr. DePalma replied, “It’d be huge.”
And then there’s the cost. Compare spinal fusion and fibrin treatment: “The treatment for a fusion – and this is the hospital fee – typically is in the $100,000 range, not including the physician’s fee,” he said. “We don’t have a set cost for [fibrin] treatment yet, but it’s approximately 95 percent less than the cost of a fusion.”
Dr. Pauza expects it to be widely available within five years.
“It’s the first time in history that we’ve been able to cause new tissue to grow within the spine. This procedure is the procedure that really the world has been waiting for,” he said.
Is it? The procedure is only for back pain sufferers with specific disc problems, but there are a lot of those . . . and Dr. Kevin Pauza is absolutely sure he’s found a better, safer, cheaper way of improving their lives.
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BecomePainFree.com Treats
- https://www.becomepainfree.com/
Herniated discs - Pinched nerves
- Degenerative spine disease
- Spinal stenosis
- Spondylolisthesis (slipped spine)
- Scoliosis (deformity)
- Low back pain / neck pain
- Spine trauma
- Spine infection
- Osteoporotic fractures
- Spine and spinal cord tumors
- Peripheral nerve injury
- Chiari malformation
- Cavernous malformation
- Vascular malformation
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Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery
Minimally Invasive Surgery:
Endoscopic Spine Surgery:
Microdiscectomy, Microlaminectomy and Microforamenotomy:
Laser Spine Surgery:
Is It Better?:
Sources:
Mathews HH and Long BH “Minimally Invasive Techniques for the Treatment of Intervertebral Disk Herniation” J. Am. Acad. Orthop. Surg., March/April 2002; 10: 80 – 85.
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Kyphoplasty Surgery, Kyphoplasty, Kypho, Vertebroplasty, Back Surgery, Spine Surgery
What is Vertebroplasty & Kyphoplasty?
Vertebroplasty and kyphoplasty are minimally invasive procedures for the treatment of vertebral compression fractures (VCF), which are fractures involving the vertebral bodies that make up the spinal column.
When a vertebral body fractures, the usual rectangular shape of the bone becomes compressed, causing pain. These compression fractures may involve the collapse of one or more vertebrae in the spine and are a common result of osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a disease that results in a loss of normal bone density, mass and strength, leading to a condition in which bones are increasingly porous, and vulnerable to breaking. Vertebrae may also become weakened by cancer.
In vertebroplasty, physicians use image guidance to inject a cement mixture into the fractured bone through a hollow needle. In kyphohplasty, a balloon is first inserted into the fractured bone through the hollow needle to create a cavity or space. The cement is injected into the cavity once the balloon is removed.
Performing Kyphoplasty Surgery
- During kyphoplasty surgery, a small incision is made in the back through which the doctor places a narrow tube. Using fluoroscopy to guide it to the correct position, the tube creates a path through the back into the fractured area through the pedicle of the involved vertebrae.
- Using X-ray images, the doctor inserts a special balloon through the tube and into the vertebrae, then gently and carefully inflates it. As the balloon inflates, it elevates the fracture, returning the pieces to a more normal position. It also compacts the soft inner bone to create a cavity inside the vertebrae.
- The balloon is removed and the doctor uses specially designed instruments under low pressure to fill the cavity with a cement-like material called polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA). After being injected, the pasty material hardens quickly, stabilizing the bone.
Kyphoplasty surgery to treat a fracture from osteoporosis is performed at a hospital under local or general anesthesia. Other logistics for a typical kyphoplasty procedure are:
- The kyphoplasty procedure takes about one hour for each vertebra involved
- Patients will be observed closely in the recovery room immediately following the kyphoplasty procedure
- Patients may spend one day in the hospital after the kyphoplasty procedure
Patients should not drive until they are given approval by their doctor. If they are released the day of the kyphoplasty surgery, they will need to arrange for transportation home from the hospital.
Recovery from Kyphoplasty
Pain relief will be immediate for some patients. In others, elimination or reduction of pain is reported within two days. At home, patients can return to their normal daily activities, although strenuous exertion, such as heavy lifting, should be avoided for at least six weeks.
Candidates for Kyphoplasty
Kyphoplasty cannot correct an established deformity of the spine, and certain patients with osteoporosis are not candidates for this treatment. Patients experiencing painful symptoms or spinal deformities from recent osteoporotic compression fractures are likely candidates for kyphoplasty. The procedure should be completed within 8 weeks of when the fracture occurs for the highest probability of restoring height.
It is not known whether kyphoplasty or vertebroplasty will increase the number of fractures at adjacent levels of the spine. Bench studies on treated bone have shown that inserting PMMA does not change the stiffness of the bone, but human studies have not been done. Osteoporosis is a chronic, progressive disease. As stated earlier, patients who have sustained fractures from osteoporosis are at an increased risk for additional fractures due to the loss of bone strength caused by osteoporosis.
Come visit one of our doctors in our group today!
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Become Pain Free, Pain, Back Pain, Spine Pain, Spine Surgery, Chronic Pain 