Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a noninvasive and nonsurgical treatment that impacts neural processing in your brain. It uses a magnetic coil (that generates a magnetic field) to stimulate specific areas of your brain.
Medical providers often use it to help with many different mental health disorders, but it’s not limited to mental health conditions.
TMS can also help with chronic pain. In fact, TMS is one of the many different treatments that our team at International Spine, Pain & Performance Center offers.
Below, we share how TMS can help with chronic pain and the five signs it’s time to consider it for chronic pain.
Chronic pain is complicated. When pain signals continue for months or years, even long after your initial injury, your nervous system can sometimes become increasingly sensitive to them.
When this happens, it’s called central sensitization, which essentially cranks up the volume on your body’s pain processing.
This is one reason chronic pain treatment sometimes needs to address more than the original injured joint, muscle, or nerve.
Our team of pain management experts may consider adding TMS to a chronic pain treatment plan if:
Pain is generally considered chronic when it lasts longer than three months or lasts beyond the expected healing period.
If you have pain that lingers longer than that, changes in your nervous system may be contributing to how strongly you experience pain.
Chronic pain treatment often starts with more conservative options, depending on what’s causing your symptoms. For example, your initial treatment plan might include medications, physical therapy, activity modifications, injections, or other interventional treatments.
Sometimes, though, you try multiple therapies, but you’re still left hurting. When standard treatments haven’t provided enough relief, it’s time to consider TMS as an alternative.
Some advanced pain treatments involve injections, procedures, or implanted devices. Those options can be valuable for the right person, but they aren’t appropriate — or appealing — to everyone.
TMS works from outside your body. It doesn’t require surgery, needles, or anesthesia. In other words, it offers a noninvasive option for people who want to explore another approach to managing persistent pain.
Chronic pain rarely stays neatly contained to one part of your life. When you’re hurting every day, you may:
TMS is already an established treatment for certain mental health conditions, including major depressive disorder.
For someone dealing with both chronic pain and depression, our specialists here at International Spine, Pain & Performance Center can consider the complete clinical picture when determining whether TMS may be appropriate.
That doesn’t mean one course of treatment automatically resolves both conditions. The type of TMS, number of treatment sessions, and protocol can differ depending on what we’re treating.
Chronic pain can result from many different problems, including arthritis, nerve damage, spinal conditions, injuries, and changes in nervous-system processing. Before recommending TMS, our team of experts needs to understand why you’re hurting and which mechanisms are contributing to your symptoms.
We also review your medical history, because certain implanted metal or electronic devices and other health considerations can affect whether TMS is appropriate for you.
Most importantly, TMS doesn’t have to replace everything else you’re doing. It may be just one component of a broader chronic pain management plan that includes rehabilitation, medications, interventional procedures, lifestyle strategies, or other therapies based on your needs.
During a treatment session, we position a specialized electromagnetic coil against your scalp. The device delivers repeated magnetic pulses that influence activity in specific areas of your brain. We focus on the brain regions involved in both pain perception and regulation.
You stay awake throughout the entire TMS treatment and can typically return to your regular activities afterward.
Your TMS treatments generally involve a series of sessions rather than a single appointment.
If you’ve been treating chronic pain exclusively at the place where it hurts, it may be time to consider the role your nervous system plays in keeping those pain signals going.
Let’s talk about TMS. Give us a call or use the “Request Appointment” button to schedule an evaluation in Washington, DC, in Arlington, Virginia, or at our Mountain Spine & Pain location in Pulaski, Virginia.
