YOUR HEALTH: Burn away back pain

SAN DIEGO, California (Ivanhoe Newswire) – Thirty million people in the US suffer from chronic low back pain; it is pain that lasts more than six months. For many, the pain lasts for years. If you’ve tried medications, steroid injections, and chiropractors and nothing relieves your pain, you’re often left suffering and out of options. Now there’s a new procedure that burns away back pain.

Andrea Beagle can now push, pull and spin her grandchildren Alice, Waylon and Wesley, but that wasn’t always the case.

“At my worst, I could barely crawl around my house for two days without the use of my legs,” she recalls.

Beagle tried it all, nothing helped, until she saw Dr. Kevin “Buzz” Barrette, an interventional pain specialist at Scripps Clinic Medical Group in San Diego.

She suffered from vertebrogenic back pain. A new procedure called basivertebral nerve ablation, or BVN, turns off the pain signal from the spine to the brain.

“This is really one of the first major breakthroughs we’ve had in back pain,” said Dr. Barrette.

An instrument is inserted into the vertebrae through a small incision in the back.

“This ablation actually burns the small nerve that provides sensation to that specific area,” explains Dr. Barrette out.

The procedure does not solve the problem structurally, but it does help with the pain.

“This procedure changed everything for me,” Beagle said.

Patients typically undergo a minimal recovery process with BVN ablation and can return to their normal activities almost immediately. Medicare covers the procedure, as do most insurers.

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