Neuropathy is a broad term referring to an injured nerve. The nerve damage can occur anywhere in your body and arise from a vast range of health conditions. As a result, neuropathy can cause many symptoms, ranging from numbness and muscle weakness to tingling and pain.
Whether your neuropathy causes an aching, burning, or intense electric-shock type of pain, it’s often severe enough to interfere with your daily life. But the team of interventional specialists at Florida Pain Medicine can help.
You don’t need to put up with neuropathy. If your current treatment fails to improve your symptoms, talk with us about your treatment options. Read on to learn about the four key approaches to comprehensive neuropathy care.
The first step is determining the root cause of your neuropathy. If your neuropathy is related to an underlying health condition, treating that problem often relieves your symptoms and gives the nerves time to heal.
Neuropathy develops from many underlying health conditions, including:
We can help with the diagnosis and treatment of some underlying conditions; others require a specialist to provide targeted therapies.
When treating neuropathy, the first line of treatment often includes medication to treat an underlying condition or relieve neuropathic pain. As experts in medication management, we review and monitor the medications prescribed by all your doctors.
We make sure that all your medications work together to achieve the best results for your condition and that the combination of meds doesn’t put you at risk for interactions and side effects.
Interventional treatments ease the pain, burning, and tingling by targeting the damaged nerves. These are just a few examples of the interventional treatments that help people with neuropathy:
Epidural steroid injections relieve back, neck, leg, and arm pain caused by inflamed nerves in your spine. Herniated discs, degenerative disc disease, and spinal stenosis are some of the most common causes of this type of neuropathy.
We inject a steroid and local anesthetic into the epidural space along your spine, near the inflamed nerves. As the steroid reduces inflammation, you get relief from the pain.
Nerves throughout your body pick up pain signals and carry them through your spinal cord to your brain. Spinal cord stimulation uses a mild electrical impulse to block pain signals traveling through the spinal cord. As a result, this treatment can relieve pain coming from damaged nerves anywhere in your body.
Nerve blocks, which contain an anesthetic and steroid, can target nearly any damaged nerve and stop it from sending pain messages to your brain. How long the nerve block lasts varies for each person, but you may get several months of relief.
During this procedure, we use a needle-like device to reach the nerve. Then we send a controlled burst of radiofrequency energy through the needle. Heat from the energy wounds the nerve, which blocks pain signals.
The results of radiofrequency ablation may last nine months to two years, depending on how long it takes the nerve to regenerate.
You may be a good candidate for regenerative treatment with platelet-rich plasma (PRP). PRP contains some plasma (the liquid part of your blood) together with a high concentration of platelets.
We make PRP from a sample of your own blood, then inject it at the damaged nerve. The platelets release growth factors that promote nerve healing.
PRP may also help heal some of the underlying causes of neuropathy. For example, PRP may accelerate healing in a herniated disc.
Don’t put up with the pain of neuropathy, call Florida Pain Medicine, or book an appointment online to get safe, effective treatment that frees you to live your life.
