Over 60 million adults live with chronic pain, and it’s the leading cause of disability in America. To make matters worse, when pain lasts for months or even years, the problem may no longer exist only where you feel it.
Chronic pain can change the way your brain and nervous system process pain signals. This can then turn up the volume on the sensations that your brain interprets as painful.
That’s one reason medications, injections, or other treatments aimed at the painful area don’t always provide enough relief.
So, if you’re dealing with back pain, joint pain, fibromyalgia, or another chronic pain condition, you may be wondering what’s next. For many people with chronic pain, the answer may be transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
Read on as our team at International Spine, Pain & Performance Center explains what TMS is and how it works for pain relief.
Before we cover how TMS works, let’s talk about how chronic pain changes how your brain responds to pain.
Pain normally serves an important purpose. For example, when you’re injured, nerves send signals through your spinal cord to your brain and alert you that something is wrong. This is a good thing; it can stop you from walking on a broken foot, for instance.
But with chronic pain, your nervous system can become increasingly sensitive to those signals. Your brain may continue producing a strong pain response even after an injury has healed or when the amount of pain you experience seems out of proportion to the tissue damage.
This heightened sensitivity is sometimes referred to as central sensitization.
If your nervous system is like a home alarm, then an alarm should sound when someone breaks a window, not every time a leaf brushes against it. With chronic pain, though, your pain-processing system can become similarly overresponsive. It’s like the house alarm going off just because the wind rattles the window.
That’s where treatments like TMS, which target your brain rather than the injury itself, may help.
TMS is a noninvasive treatment that uses magnetic pulses to stimulate targeted areas of your brain. During treatment, we position a specialized electromagnetic coil against your scalp. The device produces a series of magnetic pulses that pass through your skull and stimulate nerve cells in a carefully selected region of your brain.
For chronic pain, TMS treatment may target brain regions involved in how your brain perceives and regulates pain. Specifically, this includes high-frequency rTMS applied to the side of the body with pain at your primary motor cortex (M1).
Repeated stimulation can influence activity within these pain-processing networks and potentially change the way your brain responds to pain signals. Because you need repeated stimulation, you may sometimes see TMS referred to as “repetitive TMS” (rTMS).
There are no incisions, injections, or implanted devices, and TMS doesn’t require anesthesia.
TMS isn’t simply distracting you from your pain. rTMS can influence the communication between your nerve cells and alter activity within the brain networks responsible for pain perception.
In other words, instead of only asking, “Where does it hurt?”, TMS also addresses “How is your nervous system processing that pain?”
In other words, TMS may change activity within these pathways, so it may help turn down an overly sensitive pain response and provide relief for certain chronic pain conditions.
Chronic pain is complex, so there isn’t one treatment that works for everyone.
That’s why TMS doesn’t necessarily replace medications, physical therapy, injections, or other pain management treatments. Instead, it may become another tool in a comprehensive treatment plan designed around the reasons you’re experiencing persistent pain.
At International Spine, Pain & Performance Center, we evaluate your symptoms, medical history, previous treatments, and goals before determining whether TMS and/or another treatment is appropriate for you.
If you’ve tried multiple treatments and still live with persistent pain, it may be time to look beyond the area that hurts.
Use the “Request Appointment” button to get started, or simply give us a call to schedule an evaluation in Washington, DC, in Arlington, Virginia, or at our Mountain Spine & Pain location in Pulaski, Virginia.
