How to mitigate pain

These women got relief from pain clinics in the city.  'Pain is not a part of your body…get rid of it' announces a booklet outside one clinic.

From headaches, backaches to neck and leg aches, pain manifests in different parts of the body because of some medical condition. 

These clinics, there are just a handful in the city, manage pain with intervention that is minimally invasive. The idea is to avoid surgery as far as possible.

Pain management is a relatively unknown speciality in Ahmedabad. "Many people are scared to have surgery especially for spinal conditions.

Most of the patients I treat suffer from back or neck pain due to slip disc or spondylosis. Around 20% of my practice is cancer patients. I also get patients with facial neuralgia and sciatica," says Dr Hitesh Patel who runs a pain clinic on Drive-in Road.

He is an anaesthesiologist who has trained in US in pain intervention. Most of his patients are over 40. The treatment yields instant results in some cases and takes a few days in others.

There may be a single sitting or two to three. Usually the treatment costs between Rs10,000-Rs15,000. All procedures are performed under local anaesthesia and take around half an hour.

The World Pain Association is planning to introduce pain as a fifth vital sign. The other four are temperature, pulse, blood pressure and respiratory rate, says Dr Hitesh Patel.

Another pain physician, Dr Ashok Patel, who has a clinic in Navrangpura  says that there are two types of pain - acute (for instance, post-operative pain) and chronic. It is the latter cases that come to pain clinics.

He says that in US most patients suffer from back pain. In fact, in that country there are pain specialists who only treat spinal pain.

The second most common type of pain is cervical. People also come to pain clinics with cervicogenic headaches or headaches caused by cervical problems.

Trigeminal neuralgia, or acute pain in the face, is often mistaken for a dental problem. Surgery is risky but this pain can be alleviated in a pain clinic. Amputation cases, where the patient suffers from 'phantom limb pain', also come to pain clinics, he says.  

"One common treatment is radio frequency ablation while another is using the spinal chord stimulator,” says Dr Ashok Patel.