Chronic pain can result from injuries or underlying medical problems, such as spinal muscular atrophy, migraines, or muscular sclerosis. Visiting a professional pain management clinic allows for timely diagnosis and treatments, which may include transforaminal epidural steroid injections or radiofrequency ablation. By visiting a professional neurology service provider, you receive comprehensive, tailored, and quality treatments to help you recover. Here are four reasons to visit a doctor who specializes in treating chronic pain:
Persistent Pain
Persistent pain is recurring and may become severe even after taking pain-relief medications. The pain may be tingling, stabbing, burning, or sharp because of damage to your nerves. An injury to the nerves might cause them to become hyperactive or even send wrong pain signals to the brain, resulting in chronic, unabating pain. When you visit a pain management clinic, they look for the root cause of your pain and determine the level of nerve damage.
If you experience persistent pain, a doctor can check if the pathways of your nerves have been activated. Neurological conditions like central sensitization syndrome, stroke, diabetic neuropathy, and migraines can disrupt the pain pathways by activating them. This could also result in amplified pain. The tailored treatment plans offered by pain doctors help reset or modulate the pain pathways, reducing the experienced pain.
Sleeping Difficulty
The exacerbated pain signals due to fibromyalgia or other neurological disorders are known to cause intense discomfort, which could make it difficult to sleep. When you have chronic pain, your sympathetic nervous system becomes hyperactive. This results in alertness that interferes with normal sleep patterns. Chronic pain interferes with the normal restorative stages of sleep, resulting in fragmented sleep cycles.
Shortened restorative stages of sleep have symptoms like excessive drowsiness during the daytime. A clinic specializing in treating pain caused by neurological disorders offers quality interventions like continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy. This treatment is suitable for people with sleep disorders like sleep apnea. Neurology specialists may also prescribe muscle relaxant medications and nerve block injections that reduce the nerve pathway alertness to improve sleep.
Mobility Difficulty
Misfiring of the nerve pathways can interfere with normal body reflexes and coordination, causing mobility difficulties. When nerves in the lower back or limbs become dysfunctional, you may experience numbness in the legs. Conditions like spinal muscular atrophy cause the muscles to become weak gradually. This usually reduces the patient’s mobility. Spinal conditions like degenerative disc disease stiffen spinal joints and compress the nerves, limiting your range of motion. Neurology clinics offer treatments like medial branch blocks and therapeutic intra-articular SI joint and hip joint injections to help relieve nerve pain and restore mobility.
Cognitive Decline
Because of chronic pain and sleep disorders, you may experience anxiety and stress, which could cause cognitive decline. The experienced psychological disorders happen when the body releases cortisol, a stress hormone that responds to chronic pain. Neurological conditions can also disrupt your normal mood and memory ability due to neuroinflammation. By visiting a neurological clinic, you get anti-inflammatory treatments and therapies to help enhance your cognitive ability.
Visit a Pain Management Doctor Today
A pain management clinic conducts thorough assessments through X-rays, MRI, and CT scans to help determine the severity of your neurological condition. They diagnose chronic pain-causing conditions like disc pain, sciatica, hip joint, and facet joint pain. Make an appointment today with a professional neurology clinic if you experience any symptoms.