September is pain awareness month, and Dr. Pattanam Srinivasan is educating people about an alternative to living in pain: minimally invasive injection techniques. "Pain affects more Americans than diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined," according to the American Pain Foundation. And the National Centers for Health Statistics (NCHS) states that 76.2 million people in the United States are in pain.

"The annual cost of chronic pain in the United States, including health-care simple analgesics, with such over-the-counter products as Tylenol. But if simple analgesics aren't relieving your pain, Dr. Srinivasan says it's time to seek medical attention.

While many patients are prescribed narcotics, he's leery of them. Once you start taking them, they mask the pain, so there's no way to know if the pain — and the reason for the pain -- has been treated. In addition, he said, narcotics become very addictive.

Dr. Srinivasan also thinks that surgery should be the last resort. "Surgery is not the first step," he said. "You can utilize that option at any point in time. You should try other alternatives first."

And not all pain is the same. Dr. Srinivasan focuses on pain treatments geared to- ward the individual. "Every patient is an individual," he  said. "We need to look at the pain, and it comes from different sources."

For example, in a patient suffering from low back pain, an MRI might reveal an abnormality. Many patients are subjected to surgery or narcotics to deal with the abnormality. "However, most abnormalities don't cause pain," Dr. Srinivasan said. "A person in no pain might have worse degenerative changes than the person who has pain."

Dr. Srinivasan's injections are a combination of steroids and local anesthetics. Special equipment allows him to inject the medicine deep into the tissue to the source of the pain.
"The technique is not used a lot these days because it's easier to get some pain medicine and walk away," Dr. Srinivasan said.

The injections prompt the body to begin healing itself and erase the "pain memory." "As you have more and more prolonged pain, pain fibers sprout, increasing your sensitivity, making you even more prone to feel pain," he said. It become a vicious cycle.

Dr. Srinivasan's treatments are covered by insurance, Medicare and Medicaid. But if you want lasting pain relief with Dr. Srinivasan's treatments and you're a smoker, you'll have to stop smoking. Pain relief is sustained over many months in nonsmokers after Dr. Srinivasan's treatments, while smokers may receive only temporary relief. Smoking reduces blood flow, and good blood flow is essential for pain treatments to work, Dr. Srinivasan said. Put simply, if you're a smoker, you're not going to get lasting pain relief.

 

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