Radiofrequency Ablation: A Lasting Approach to Your Chronic Joint Pain

Radiofrequency ablation is a treatment meant to provide long-lasting relief from chronic joint pain, targeting pain at the nerve level. Here’s what you need to know about the procedure and what it may offer for you and your joint pain condition.

Temporary joint pain — perhaps due to an injury or overexertion — is one thing. You can expect rest and treatment to result in an improving condition over time. But joints can be subject to ongoing deterioration.

After three months of constant or frequent pain, we may consider your joint pain to be chronic, particularly if you’re already receiving conservative treatments without improvement. It’s the time when you should consider more aggressive care.

At Midwest Innovative Pain Management in Dyer, Indiana, we often recommend radiofrequency ablation, a minimally invasive procedure that supports reduced pain and improved mobility. It’s a step beyond conservative care, one that can postpone or eliminate the need for surgical solutions.

Let’s take a deeper look into radiofrequency ablation as a lasting approach for treating chronic joint pain.

The fundamentals of radiofrequency ablation

Radiofrequency energy can, like microwaves, be a generator of heat. In the case of radiofrequency ablation (RFA), this energy targets nerve tissue. When heated sufficiently, treated nerve tissue is no longer viable.

The destroyed nerve cannot transmit pain signals to your brain so your pain load begins to shrink. RFA is strictly a pain management tool. It doesn’t repair damage or reverse the effects of chronic conditions such as arthritis.

Applications of RFA

RFA is suitable for use on many of the major joints in your body. Commonly, RFA treats conditions such as:

Knee pain connected with osteoarthritis
Sacroiliac (SI) joint pain
Back or neck pain originating in the facet joints
Some cases of hip or shoulder pain

Knees, hips, and shoulders are the largest joints in the human body and are frequently the sites of chronic pain. The spine has many distinct joints.

What to expect from treatment

RFA delivers warming energy through an electrode-equipped needle targeted on the nerve that creates the pain signals it sends to the brain. This locally applied heat creates a lesion in the nerve tissue that disrupts its function.

The precision of RFA means that healthy nerve tissue surrounding the target nerve remains undamaged. We often pinpoint problem nerves by using diagnostic nerve blocks to identify the correct tissue for RFA treatment.

We perform RFA as an outpatient procedure using local anesthetics. Most patients tolerate the procedure well and require little downtime.

Your pain relief should be significant, lasting for months and sometimes longer. Nerve tissue can regenerate, so it’s possible for the pain to return in some cases.

The RFA treatment experience varies from patient to patient, though the diagnostic nerve block demonstrates what you can expect from your RFA session.

Contact us at Midwest Innovative Pain Management to learn more about RFA and its applications. Call or click today to request a consultation.