Less Back Pain. More Living

“Back in the Saddle” | Megan’s Life After the Intracept™ Procedure

Pain. Just really, it affects you in a way that you just can't even imagine.

I started to wonder what I would do with my business, since I'm a professional horseback rider, if I can't ride anymore.

Intracept gave me my life back.

I went over a jump and my right leg went numb. That's when I herniated my first disc. Wear and tear and my sport took its toll on me.

They always advised me not to have surgery when I was too young, because it also takes its toll on the vertebrae above.

You'd have better days and then worse days. Eventually, the worse days got more frequent until it was just agonizing.

I've done everything. I've done yoga. I've done Pilates. I've gone to the float centers so you could be weightless. I've done heat and ice and compression, shockwave, acupuncture, cold laser therapy. I've done literally everything that you could possibly do.

I felt so helpless.

I had one doctor tell me, "I think you're doing more for yourself than I can."

I mean, I just started choking down medication, feeling like there's nothing that we can do here until I get a fusion surgery, and I don't want to do that.

I found Dr. Tran, and he had the solution.

When I saw Megan, the MRI was consistent with what we suspected. Her L5-S1 disc was severely degenerated. I mean, it was pretty much those two vertebral bodies, bone on bone, rubbing against each other. There was inflammation in the endplate and the bones, which we call Modic changes.

The treatment for endplate pain is Intracept. There's really nothing that matches Intracept in terms of how minimally invasive it is, how low risk it is, and how effective it is in terms of the success rates.

Dr. Tran said most people can go back to normal life in like two or three days. He told me to stay off of a horse for 10 days. I did, kind of.

In the next six months, I lost weight because I was moving again. I was riding, and so I was getting stronger again.

Life came back.

You know, her story is a remarkable one, but it's not a unique one. The majority of my patients that I treat with Intracept have a similar story. They tell me their life has changed.

They feel like this is a miraculous cure, that they have their life back.

I've seen more patients in follow-ups with tears in their eyes from the happiness after this procedure than any other procedure I've ever done, and that's just extremely rewarding as a physician to see that.

In the year and a half since my surgery, I purchased a horse for myself. Tomorrow, I'm going to go down to a horse show south of the city and just ride in a class on my horse.

It gave me the passion of why I do what I do back.

Intracept is absolutely life-changing. I was hopeless, and it gave me hope again.

Dr. Massengale Patient Testimonial Transcript:

With Richard. It's interesting. The proxy to his success was how much work he can do in the yard at any given time. So, I knew how severe it was by how many days he'd not worked in the yard.

Intracept is a great thing to investigate for these patients who don't respond to other interventions.

I got rear-ended in 2010, but you know, I went to PT. Everything seemed to be fine. Then I started, of course, working around the yard as you get older gets more painful.

So, when it came to a point that I needed to see a chiropractor, I got a hold of Ian and I would go a lot.

It was always painful. I couldn't even bend over to put my Diet Coke in the refrigerator. The minute I bent over, I had pain seconds and seconds. I had pain. At that point I knew it wasn't gonna get any better.

He's the one that said, “Hey, I really, I really can't do a whole lot more for you. We gotta, we gotta go to the next step.” It was constant pain.

In general, 30 to 35% of the population in the United States suffers some type of spine related disorder during the year. There's over 500 different options for treatments for chronic back pain and it's really trying to find the right treatment for the right patient.

If everybody's a nail and you just have one hammer, you have a lot of folks that fail. But we really try to figure out what's the right treatment for the right patient.

You can put me on, you do whatever you want as long as you get rid of my pain. It would be great.

He just seemed like a perfect referral to Dr. Massengale and he said, yeah, let's, let's give it a shot.

Not every patient needs surgery when they first show up. In fact, few do most of the time. What they need is good conservative treatment. Conservative treatments begin with physical therapy, chiropractic and injections.

When patients fail, the kind of treatments that we start out with, they'd consider having surgery. If it were to be useful. That's where we come in.

Dr. Massengale said, “we're gonna put four little holes in your back.” I said, “big holes.?” He said “No, and then they put glue on it on the four holes and you will not have any pain.” Sure.

The kind of problems that we used to have to treat with screws and rods for back pain often are the kind of degenerative problems that we used to think were all due to motion of the spine.

That was abnormal inflammation in the bones and in the discs that you can see on the MRI scans. We used to think, oh, that's because the spine is moving funny. The only way is to put rods and screws in it and just lock it, stop it from moving entirely.

With Intracept, we can make the nerve in the spine that feeds the part of the bone that carries the signals for pain from those areas to the brain. We can burn that nerve away so that it no longer carries those signals.

The inflammation in the spine that maybe was caused by the motion originally has taken on a life of its own and the key to the treatment of that pain is to calm down the nerve that is carrying that pain signal and that's what the Intracept does.

So, they looked at the MRIs and said, yeah, it can work. 

The kind of pattern on the inflammation is what we call modic changes. When I saw that his symptoms seem to correlate with the kind of changes on his MRI scan, I was able to say, you look like a good match because both fit your symptoms and your findings, and I think that makes you a good candidate.

His response to the procedure was tremendous.

He was right, could run out of the place. They gave me meds. I didn't take anything, not even an aspirin.

After that, it was like I'm back 20 years ago with no pain and to this day still no pain. It's been great.

It's very gratifying to see that I can offer someone a treatment that doesn't place them at risk of developing downstream future problems. The same way a big spine surgery would. 

Intracept really helps a lot of patients avoid the need for traditional spine surgery, but still achieve the same kind of outcome.

Richard knocks on the door, says, “Hey, what's going on?” I said, “Hey, I thought you just came by to get a coffee and say hi.” I said, “What are you doing here?”

He said, “Well, I hurt my thumb. So, I'm in occupational therapy.” I said, “How'd you hurt your thumb?” Well, I did about 10 hours’ worth of yard work one day and I hurt my thumb.

I said, “What about your low back?” Oh, that's fine. I hurt my thumb now. 

So, I hadn't golfed for 10 years. Starting to take it up again. I don't have to call anybody. I don't have to wait for anybody to come and do the things I used to do. Now I just do it.

We try to get him to the right care at the right time. If this has been five years before, the only option for him would be repeated injections, which weren't working, or you know, at some point a spinal fusion if it got bad enough that he had the leg pain also.

So, to have a guy like him go through such a simple and safe procedure as Intracept is as a tool for all of us. For such a low-risk procedure, the potential benefit is tremendous. That's what differentiates Intracept from a traditional spine surgical procedure. 

I can potentially get such a dramatic improvement in my patient's outcome and quality of life for such a simple and low risk intervention. It's really game changing.

Your quality of life is sufficiently compromised. Talk to your doctor about what might be a good strategy. It's possible that something like Intracept could be beneficial for you and help you get your quality of life back

When you're at that threshold. Just do it. It won't get any worse. It's only gonna get better.