Specialists provide life-changing alternatives to prescription pain medication dependence

SALT LAKE CITY — If he thinks about it, Mike Roman can feel a tingling sensation where his toes used to be.

The constant stream of electronic pulses, however, is much better than the intense burning he used to feel — similar, he said, to pliers ripping out each toenail one by one — before a pain management specialist implanted a spinal cord stimulator to deal with Roman's phantom limb pain.

It's a seasoned medical device that has come a long way in the last decade or so, said Dr. Richard Glines, interventional pain medicine specialist at St. Mark's Hospital.

"Instead of pain, we are competing with the nerves to produce a different feeling," he said. The stimulator and a small battery, which are concealed completely under the skin at the small of the back, produce a small amount of electrical current that is delivered to the spinal cord, creating parasthesia so other sensations can interfere with the brain's attempt to interpret pain.

It doesn't work for everyone, but Glines said the device has a high success rate when it is used because it can be tested prior to the long-term commitment that implantation entails.

It's just one of the alternatives to addictive narcotic pain medications that is available to treat chronic pain, a significant public health problem that ends up costing society around $600 billion a year in health care and lost productivity, according to the American Academy of Pain Medicine.

And it isn't uncommon, as more Americans suffer from pain than from diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined.

Utah is one of the top states in the nation for deaths due to pain medication overdoses, which killed 236 people in 2010, according to the Utah Department of Health. Of those who died from either prescribed or illicit opioid use, approximately 90 percent suffered from chronic pain, which is difficult to treat because symptoms and experiences vary so greatly.

More than 50,000 Utahns reportedly use narcotic medications that are not prescribed to them and physicians have said that current economical conditions have spurred even higher use.

"The common visualization of a pain patient isn't very flattering and it isn't that way all of the time," said Roman. "There are people like me who are just trying to get their life back and trying to become a better husband and better father. We think maybe if we can get a handle on this, we can get a job and get back into society."