Each day, you wake up and wonder just how much your chronic pain will interfere with your day, and you’re certainly not alone in this. Nearly one-quarter of adults in the United States have chronic pain, and 8.5% of adults report high-impact pain that limits their lives.
If you’re tired of the daily struggle with pain, the team here at Johnston Pain Management wants to introduce you to one of our more successful solutions — radiofrequency ablation (RFA). Let’s take a look at some of the many benefits of this approach to pain management.
The concept behind RFA is simple: We go straight to the nerve(s) responsible for pain signaling and disrupt their ability to send messages.
We make you comfortable on the treatment table and administer a local anesthetic. Then, we use a live X-ray (fluoroscopy) to guide a hollow needle into the area containing the nerves sending the pain signals. Once in position, we thread an electrode through that delivers RF energy into the nerve. This energy ablates (burns) the nerve, preventing it from sending pain messages to your brain.
We often perform a test run with a local anesthetic to ensure we're targeting the right nerves. Simply put, we inject a 24-hour block into the nerves we feel are responsible for the pain signaling. If you experience relief, we know we’ve identified the correct nerve fibers, and we will schedule your RFA.
Once we finish your RFA procedure and check to make sure that you’re OK, we will place a small bandage over the site where we used the needles, and you’ll be free to go home.
You may feel a little sore afterward, but we’ll provide you with complete aftercare instructions for returning to activities.
Over the course of the following days, and sometimes weeks, the pain messaging should quiet down, giving you a much-needed break from your pain.
Another benefit our patients enjoy is that, after their RFA procedure, they can reduce, if not eliminate, their pain medications.
RFA is a great solution for a wide range of degenerative musculoskeletal and neuropathic issues that cause ongoing pain, such as:
This list is far from complete, but it gives an idea of the wide range of conditions that RFA can address.
It’s impossible to determine how long you can enjoy your results as it depends on how quickly your nerve grows back. That said, people can enjoy weeks, months, and even a year or more of pain relief after an RFA procedure. And the good news is that, once the nerve regrows, we can schedule another quick-and-easy RFA procedure.
If you’d like to explore whether an RFA procedure is right for your chronic pain, please schedule a consultation at one of our three conveniently located clinics in Jacksonville, Hampstead, and New Bern, North Carolina.
