Interventional pain management

My practice has specialised in particular in interventional pain management. Interventional pain therapy is an area of pain therapy that is different to conservative (medicine-based and physical) therapies. The focus is on local injection techniques, and minimally invasive, percutaneous (through the skin) and microsurgical treatment techniques. Most of these small-scale interventions and infiltration treatments are carried out using fluoroscopy checks, which makes it possible to identify the structures that are causing the pain.

Especially in the case of pain originating in the spine, the invasive methods of pain management therapy are used. If patients continue to suffer from severe pain despite having had physiotherapy, injections or an operation, they can ask their German health insurance provider to pay for outpatient treatment from an interventional pain management therapist, thus delaying operations that require a hospital stay, or avoiding them altogether.

Outpatient treatments for the spine and joints include:

• Injections into the facet joints in the spine, in addition to intra- and periarticular therapy.
• Injections near the nerve roots of the spinal cord, nerve root blocks and periradicular therapy (PRT), transforaminal therapy or injections into the spinal canal (epidural injections)..
• Thermal obliteration or denervation of the nerves supplying the facet joints, also known as thermal coagulation.
• Disc therapies by way of injections of pharmaceuticals/ozone into the disc itself.
• Slipped disc operations/decompressions, through percutaneous (via the skin) minimally invasive interventions, with various treatment techniques, such as use of medical lasers (Percutaneous Laser Disc Decompression/PLDD), plasma fields in the disc (Nucleoplasty/NPLY), heat energy in the discs (intradiscal electrotherapy/IDET).
• Bone cement stabilisation of broken vertebrae, via injections of bone cement into the porous vertebrae, osteoporosis-induced wear or bone tumours (vertebroplasty/kyphoplasty).
• Treatments for bone tumours using radiofrequency thermal ablation (RFA).
• Injections into the joints, using pharmaceuticals from orthomolecular orthopaedics.
• Injections for stubborn muscle spasms, using Botulinum toxin (Botox).