Pain Management
Outpatient Pain Management Procedures in Exton, PA
When you experience chronic pain on a daily basis – or when it’s enough to knock the wind out of you when it comes – it’s time to opt for an outpatient surgical procedure to treat it.
Just as there are countless varieties and causes of pain, there are many treatments and procedures to treat it. How best to treat or manage pain depends on numerous factors, including:
- Severity of a patient’s pain and other symptoms
- Cause and location of the pain
- How often it occurs or how long the pain lasts
- The extent to which symptoms disrupt a patient’s quality of life
For many patients, an outpatient pain management procedure may eliminate or reduce pain, or the surgery may offer continuous, ongoing pain relief. Often, your doctor will recommend an outpatient pain management surgery when other methods, such as physical therapy or pain medications, fail to provide adequate relief.
Conditions Treated
Surgeons credentialed with The Surgery Center of Chester County in Exton, Pennsylvania, use our facility to treat a great many conditions that can cause pain, including:
- Arthritis
- Car accidents
- Falls
- Herniated discs
- Muscle spasms
- Nerve disorders
- Pinched nerves
- Post-op pain that doesn’t improve over time
- Soft tissue injuries
- Spinal stenosis
- Sports injuries
- Workplace injuries
Common Outpatient Pain Management Procedures
Common types of pain management procedures performed on an outpatient basis include:
Epidurals are a type of regional anesthesia used to numb a section of the body. It is delivered as an image-guided injection of anesthetic or steroid directly into your back – specifically, into the epidural space surrounding the nerves in your spinal cord. Epidurals are a type of nerve block.
Other nerve blocks are typically described based on where the injection is administered, such as near a specific bundle of nerves (peripheral nerve block), medial nerves connected to a specific facet joint (cervical medial branch block or lumbar medial branch block), or sacroiliac (SI) joint injection.
This type of procedure uses an electrical current to heat and destroy nerve signaling – to prevent pain before it can be interpreted by the brain as pain. RFA is a type of rhizotomy, which involves destroying the target nerves using a variety of methods, such as surgical implements, chemicals, or heat. With RFA, your provider will use specialized needles to target specific tissue in the body.
Spinal cord stimulators are implanted devices that deliver low levels of electrical activity to the spine to interrupt pain signaling by the nerves. This relieves a patient’s pain by preventing nerve signals from getting to the brain, where it would be interpreted as pain. Placement is typically a multistep process, beginning with electrodes being delivered into the epidural space of the spinal canal via injection.
There are a number of different outpatient procedures that can help eliminate pain caused by spinal compression. For example:
- Spacers are implanted between areas of the spine to help relieve compressed nerves that may be contributing to a patient’s pain. The Vertiflex procedure is an example of this method.
- Minimally invasive lumbar decompression (MILD) involves the removal of excess tissue to open up the spinal canal and relieve pressure on nerves within the canal in patients with spinal stenosis.
Our Pain Management Providers
- Dr. Yasmin Elkhashab, MD
- Dr. Michael Fishman, MD
- Dr. Philip Kim*, MD
- Dr. Ronald Lincow*, DO
- Dr. Jeffrey Rowe, MD
- Dr. Matthew Schaeffer, MD
* Federal regulations require that we inform you that these physicians have an ownership interest in The Surgery Center of Chester County.
