Living with Chronic Back Pain? Discover Advanced Relief Options Beyond Medication

Back pain is both common and complicated. A wide range of causes can contribute to lower back discomfort. That alone makes it difficult to treat. But when you add in the fact that it’s very hard to give your back a full rest, healing back pain can require some specialized care.

Fortunately, Ike Malik, MD, and our team offer that right here at Texas Pain & Orthopedics in  Pflugerville, Texas. With extensive experience treating back pain, Dr. Malik can help you explore the wide range of treatment options available to you.

If conservative measures like physical therapy and activity modification haven’t helped and medication hasn’t been effective, come see Dr. Malik. He may recommend any of the following advanced relief options. 

Injection-based treatments

Dr. Malik can apply treatment right where your back needs it by injecting it. He tailors the injection to your back pain cause and the symptoms you experience. 

If you have radiating back pain, for example, he might recommend an epidural steroid injection. If your pain is mechanical and comes from an issue with specific joints in your back, like your sacroiliac joints or your facet joints, he might suggest a peripheral joint injection. 

If a nerve issue is causing your back pain, he may recommend a nerve block. This treatment involves injecting medication to stop pain signals from traveling to your brain.

Stimulation-based treatments

Your nerves use electricity to communicate with your brain. When they detect harmful stimuli, they send electrical signals to your brain telling you that it hurts. This is what lets you know you should pull your hand off a hot surface, and fast. 

The problem is that sometimes your nerves send pain signals when they shouldn’t. Fortunately, you can interrupt that signaling with tiny electrical pulses of your own.

If medications haven’t eased your pain, Dr. Malik may recommend spinal cord stimulation (SCS) or peripheral nerve stimulation to help reduce your discomfort.

Regenerative medicine-based treatments

The human body has innate healing power. Regenerative medicine allows doctors to harness some of that power and apply it where patients need it. It can be particularly useful for back pain. 

In this category, Dr. Malik offers both stem cell therapy and platelet-rich plasma (PRP). With both treatments, he takes something from your body (stem cells or a blood sample), then retools it in the lab. 

For PRP therapy, he spins a sample of your blood in a centrifuge to separate and concentrate the platelets. Those have high concentrations of growth factors that can support healing. Injecting the platelet-rich plasma into your back may help your body’s regenerative processes work as they should. 

This is only an overview of some of the treatment options available to you. To figure out what might best address your back pain, schedule an appointment with Dr. Malik. Call our office or book your visit online today.