I'm Considering the Intracept Procedure for Back Pain. What Do I Need to Know?

If you were to pick a common health complaint worldwide, low back pain would be one of them. 

In fact, nearly 620 million people around the globe struggle with low back pain, and the medical community is constantly on the hunt for effective options that can provide much-needed relief.

At Sunshine Spine and Pain Specialists, PLLC, our team has joined these efforts and is researching all the latest advances in treating lower back pain. After doing our homework, our team leaders — Dr. Peter Fernandez and Dr. Amanda Fernandez — have settled on a suite of minimally invasive procedures that can address different types of lower back pain. We want to focus on one here: Intracept®.

So, let’s dive in to see whether Intracept might be an avenue worth pursuing for your lower back pain.

Behind your lower back pain

Lower back pain can occur for many reasons, and many stem from issues in the lumbar spine (as opposed to muscle strains).

To better understand this, let’s take a brief dive into the anatomy of your lumbar spine, which includes:

• Five vertebrae
• Five discs
• Five pairs of spinal roots

A reason for the high prevalence of back pain is that your spine is a primary conduit of your peripheral nervous system. The nerve roots that exit your spine at each vertebral segment are often in the line of fire when you have a problem in your lumbar spine. A great example is sciatica — something in your lower back is compressing your sciatica nerve.

Another example is what we call vertebrogenic low back pain — a type of pain that occurs when the protective endplates on either end of each of your vertebrae become damaged.

As a result of this damage, the nerve inside your vertebra — your basivertebral nerve — becomes irritated and sends pain signals to your brain. The symptoms of vertebrogenic pain include just that — pain —  which people often describe as a deep, aching pain in their back. This pain can worsen with prolonged sitting, activity, and bending forward.

Relieving vertebrogenic low back pain with Intracept

During an Intracept procedure, we target the basivertebral nerve in the segment of your lumbar spine that’s giving you problems, and we ablate (destroy) some of the nerve tissue to prevent it from relaying pain signals.

This technique is called radiofrequency ablation (RFA), and it isn’t new. However, it can be tricky to access certain nerves. That’s where Intracept comes in, with a unique system and specialized tools that allow us to target these nerves to bring you relief.

It takes us only a few minutes to deliver the RFA, and you’re awake during the entire procedure, although we use a local anesthetic to numb the site where we insert a cannula (small tube). We use fluoroscopy (live X-ray) to guide us so that we’re sure we’re targeting the right group of nerve fibers.

Once we complete your Intracept procedure, you’re free to go home. We will ask that you take it easy for the rest of the day. You can get back to your normal routine very quickly. However, please avoid heavy lifting for a week or two while the newly ablated nerve settles down.

From our experience, Intracept is a great solution for vertebrogenic pain and one that delivers meaningful and sustainable relief.

If you’d like to explore whether Intracept might be the answer for your lower back pain, please don’t hesitate to contact our Sarasota, Florida, office to schedule a consultation today. You can call 941-867-7463 or use our online booking request form.