Surgery is generally
only used as a last
resort in patients
with chronic pain.
A wide variety of
surgical procedures
are used to treat
pain, depending
upon the location
and suspected cause
of the pain. Many
people undergo
back surgery to
relieve the pain of
a ruptured disc.
Surgeons remove
bone fragments
from the ruptured disc that may be pressing on sensitive spinal nerves. The most radical procedures
for neuropathic pain sever the offending branch of the nervous system so that the brain no longer
receives pain signals from a certain area of the body. However, these procedures can also affect the
patient’s ability to perceive non-pain sensations and sometimes result in new pain. Similarly,
neuroablation procedures seal off individual nerves from the rest of the nervous system through a
number of methods; in radiofrequency lesioning, heat supplied through a wire by electrical current
is used to cauterize the nerve, but ablation can also be achieved by the application of extreme cold
or a chemical agent. Unfortunately, pain relief from neuroablation is frequently only temporary
because new nerves may grow to compensate for the destroyed one.