New tool to fight chronic back pain deployed in Sonoma County

Chronic back pain is a stubborn problem for many Americans, but technology is opening the door to a new drug-free form of treatment in Sonoma County.

Local pain management specialists have teamed up with Sutter Health's surgery center in Santa Rosa to offer a new device that uses electrical pulses to block pain signals from traveling up the spinal cord.

The battery-powered device, which is implanted in the lower back and buttocks area, relieves chronic back pain without the annoying tingling sensation of the traditional spinal cord stimulator, said Dr. Jason Pope, president of Summit Pain Alliance, a specialty medical group with offices in Santa Rosa and Petaluma. In fact, the only thing you're supposed to feel is absence of pain, he said.

“The pain is not replaced with a new sensation, the pain just goes away,” Pope said. “The device conceptually is kind of like a pacemaker, but it's a pacemaker for pain.”

The device, the Senza spinal cord stimulation system, is made by Nevro, a Menlo Park-based medical device company. It uses Nevro's proprietary HF10 therapy, high-frequency electrical pulses that do not trigger the tingling sensations associated with traditional, lower-frequency spine stimulation pain relief systems.

Spinal cord stimulation technology has been around since 1967 and has undergone major refinements over the past five decades. Historically, most advances have been in hardware, such as the use of different electrode configurations. Many innovations have focused on reducing the accompanying tingling or pricking sensations, known as paresthesia.

Newer wave forms such as Nevro's HF10, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last May, do not give a tingling sensation and cannot be felt.

“(Summit Pain) Alliance is fortunate enough to have a partner like Sutter to offer the community these advanced pain care options,” Pope said.

Since the device is implanted, Summit Pain Alliance puts patients through a trial period to test the effectiveness of the treatment. The trial lasts three to five days and involves a 10-minute procedure, which uses minimally invasive needles to deliver the HF10 electrical pulses. The implant itself takes between 35 to 40 minutes. For those candidates who react positively to the treatment, “the amount of relief is not something they have to think about. ... They will know,” Pope said.

Dan Peterson, administrator of the Sutter Health surgery center, which is located in the medical office building next to the new Sutter Santa Rosa Medical Center, said the partnership with Summit Pain Alliance is part of an effort to keep up with current trends in medicine. The surgery center has about 40 active surgeons, he said.

“We're very excited to be working with Summit Pain Alliance to bring new treatment options to the community,” Peterson said. “We've built a brand new facility on campus ... with the idea in mind that it should be a state-of-the-art facility.”

Summit Pain Alliance, which has been serving the North Coast for about five years, specializes in treating patients who suffer from chronic pain, including headaches and back, pelvic, abdominal and facial pain. The typical patient has had chronic pain for more than two years, Pope said.

The HF10 therapy is the latest treatment offered by Pope and his two partners, Dr. John Hau and Dr. Michael Yang. A host of others include Botox, cortisone and epidural steroid injections, non-opioid and opioid medication management, muscle relaxers, ultrasound-guided procedures, radio-frequency ablation and traditional spinal cord stimulation.

Nearly 50 million American adults suffer from daily chronic pain or severe pain, according to a study released last year by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. The study found that people in serious pain use health care services more frequently and suffer greater disability than people with lower levels of pain.

The new HF10 treatment comes at a time of growing concern in the United State over a national epidemic of prescription drug abuse that stems from the over-prescription of opioid medications such as hydrocodone and oxycodone. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the total number of deaths from prescription opioid pain relievers has more than tripled between 2001 and 2014, from just under 6,000 to about 19,000.

Pope said the CDC has determined that the use of opioid-based medicine for the treatment of chronic pain is unsustainable and unsafe with a high rate of failure. The longer a patient uses opioid medications the less they work, he said, requiring larger doses in what becomes a vicious circle.

Pope added that stimulation treatments such as the new HF10 therapy “give us the opportunity to reduce and potentially eliminate the need for chronic opioid use.”

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @renofish.