Nerve Pain Following Injuries and Surgeries: How It Starts and How It’s Treated..
When you’re injured, you expect to experience:
- trauma and pain
- healing (in days, weeks, or months)
- complete restoration of normal feeling (no more pain)
But sometimes, after a major injury or surgery, that doesn’t happen.
Sometimes the body’s nerves cause pain after a wound or an injury has healed.
This chronic pain condition is known as neuropathy.
What trauma causes chronic nerve pain?
severed nerves:
- severed limbs, amputations, and other injuries such as deep penetrating trauma from knife wounds
crushed or compressed nerves:
- injuries with enough force to damage nerves (car accidents, sports trauma, falls, and more)
- repetitive stress (activities like typing that lead to nerve compression conditions such as carpal tunnel syndrome)
Treatments
- Prescription Medication
Pain specialists will often recommend prescription medications such as anticonvulsants and antidepressants, which have proven effective in relieving nerve pain.
When nerve pain is accompanied by inflammation, they may also recommend corticosteroid injections.
- Electrostimulation
Electrostimulation is a minimally invasive treatment that involves implanting tiny electrode devices into the body that target nerves with low levels of non-painful electrical impulses.
The impulses can deceive the brain into lessening or blocking out the sensation of pain entirely.
Electrostimulation treatments include transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, spinal cord stimulation, and more.
These cause minor or no side effects, and unlike opioids and other pharmaceutical drugs, they don’t lead to dependency.
- Nerve Blocks
Nerve blocks are injections of anesthetic and steroids into the tissue surrounding the nerves causing pain.
Your pain specialist may recommend one or more nerve blocks as a diagnostic tool and short-term (1-2 weeks) pain relief treatment.
- Natural Therapies
Physical therapy is almost always a critical part of the healing and function-recovery process following severe injuries and trauma.
And some people get relief from other natural therapies such as massage, acupuncture, desensitization, relaxation techniques, and heat and cold therapy.
- Over-the-Counter Medication
Non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen and aspirin can provide temporary pain relief.
Get Treatment As Early As Possible!
The chances you will develop chronic pain from neuropathy go down the earlier you receive treatment.
And it’s vital that you see a nerve specialist (such as a peripheral nerve surgeon) or pain specialist because they have the expertise to determine whether you have nerve damage.
Nerve Pain Treatment in San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas
It may only be temporary pain caused by injury to muscles and bone.
But if you think you may be experiencing nerve pain after a traumatic injury or major surgery, Texas Pain Physicians can help.
Our pain specialists will find the root cause and develop a treatment plan that works for you.
Please give us a call at (972) 636-5727 or book your appointment online.
