Sometimes the pain felt like lightning bolts. Or snakes biting. Or needles.
“Just imagine the worst burn you’ve ever had, all over your body, never going away,” said Ed Mowery, 55, describing his life with chronic pain. “I would wake up in the middle of night, screaming at the top of my lungs.”
Beginning with a severe knee injury he got playing soccer at 15, he underwent about 30 major surgeries for various injuries over the decades, including procedures on his knees, spine and ankles. Doctors put in a spinal cord stimulator, which delivers electrical pulses to relieve pain, and prescribed morphine, oxycodone and other medications, 17 a day at one point. Nothing helped.
Unable to walk or sit for more than 10 minutes, Mr. Mowery, of Rio Rancho, N.M., had to stop working at his job selling electronics to engineering companies and stop playing guitar with his death metal band.
Out of options four years ago, Mr. Mowery signed up for a cutting-edge experiment: a clinical trial involving personalized deep brain stimulation to try to ease chronic pain.
The study, published on Wednesday, outlines a new approach for the most devastating cases of chronic pain, and could also provide insights to help drive invention of less invasive therapies, pain experts said.
“It’s highly innovative work, using the experience and technology they have developed and applying it to an underserved area of medicine,” said Dr. Andre Machado, chief of the Neurological Institute at Cleveland Clinic, who was not involved in the study.
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The post Treating Chronic Pain is Hard. An Experimental Approach Shows Promise. appeared first on New York Times.
