A Spinal Cord Stimulator(SCS) or Dorsal Column Stimulator (DCS) is an implantable medical device used to treat chronic pain of neurologic origin. An electric impulse generated by the device near the dorsal surface of the spinal cord provides a paresthesia (”tingling”) sensation that alters the perception of pain by the patient.

A trial is usually done before the permanent unit is placed. A temporary percutaneous lead is used and is connected to an external pulse generator. The trial is from 3 to 7 days. If the patient has at least 50% improvement in pain during the trial, the patient is considered a candidate for the permanent unit.

When a back surgery is done correctly and at the appropriate time, back surgery can be a godsend to the individual suffering from pain that sears into the leg or arm. For patients who are experiencing neurological symptoms like loss of control of the bowel or bladder, back surgery is necessary to prevent permanent paralysis. Patients with foot drop often must have back surgery performed quickly to prevent permanent nerve damage. Fortunately, these cases of emergency back surgery are not too common.

Most of us are familiar with back pain of some kind. You bend over to pick something up or twist the wrong way, and the pain hits you like a baseball bat. Even though it hurts a lot, however, you usually get better in a few days by resting, using a heating pad or ice packs and taking anti-inflammatory medications.

Sometimes your back pain doesn’t go away, though. It may have been getting worse for a long time, and you’re tired of suffering with it. You’ve probably tried a lot of things besides home treatment, like prescription medications, steroid injections and physical therapy, and you’re still not getting relief.

New technologies, aging baby boomers and the improving reputations of area hospitals have back surgeries surging on Long Island.

Throughout the 15 hospitals of the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, Long Island’s largest hospital chain, spine surgeries are up by more than 1,000 over the past five years and the system is on pace to perform almost 3,000 back surgeries this year.

Spinal surgeries have also jumped at South Nassau Communities Hospital by 100 a year, with 500 back procedures expected to be performed before 2007 expires, according to Mary Weiner, South Nassau’s vice president for perioperative services.

There are a number of different types of spine surgery to treat a variety of back conditions. Surgery should be considered if a patient has a significant neurological deficit, or if non-surgical therapy fails to alleviate the pain. Regarding the role of surgery for failed medical therapy in patients without a neurological deficit, a review concluded that ‘limited evidence is now available to support some aspects of surgical practice’. An MRI scan is an essential component of diagnostic evaluation. The ongoing Spine Patient outcomes Research Trial (SPORT) is addressing the role of surgery .

Some of the more common forms of surgery are:

People with severe back pain due to a ruptured disk usually recover whether they have surgery or decide to wait it out, though an operation brings immediate pain relief. And contrary to what many people are told by their surgeons, avoiding surgery does not result in nerve damage. These findings are from a large clinical trial published in November in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Many back surgeons criticized this trial before it began because they were convinced of disk surgery’s benefit. Some refused to refer their patients to a trial they saw as unethical because surgery would be withheld from some study participants, a necessary component to a study intended to randomly assign half to non-surgical treatment.

When a disc within the spine is damaged, the pain that results can be devastating. It’s a problem that’s affected many people over the years, and recently, medical advancements have been made that can help to alleviate the problem. Approved by the Food and Drug Administration of the United States in October of 2004, artificial disc surgery has been shown to be an effective way of helping those with damaged discs. In this article, we’ll discuss the surgery in order to help you to understand the process.

If you recently had a back surgery your probably still experiencing pain, the first thing you should do obviously is to ask your doctor for some form of remedies to relive back pain after surgery to help reduce your suffering. On the other hand there are a couple of techniques that can be applied at home to help you with you pain issue. However before using any of those techniques you need to talk to your doctor just to make sure that you are not going to damage you back while applying those. The most important thing to consider is that you need to allow you back to heal properly; this is why it is very important to talk to your doctor before applying any of the following techniques.

While no area in spinal surgery seems to exist without controversy, laminectomies continue to be one of the most controversial. By definition, a laminectomy is a surgical procedure in which a portion of a vertebra is removed to relieve pressure on the spinal cord on the nerve roots that emerge from the spinal canal. The procedure is often used to treat spinal stenosis, a progressive narrowing of the opening in the spinal canal.

Do surgery seems the last resort to you to get relief from severe back pain? Well, the number of cases where the doctors recommend surgery is on the increase these days. So you are not the only one who is recommended surgery to get back pain relief. But before you go through the surgery procedure, you need to take extreme care. After all it is your back! The doctor may have several patients, but you just have one back!