PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The FDA recently approved a spinal cord stimulator that puts the patient in charge of managing pain, without the need to recharge the device’s battery.
Dr. Doron Rabin, chief of neurosurgery at St. Luke University Health Network — which is headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania — said the development means less aggravation and better quality of life for people with long-term back and leg pain.
The Medtronic Vanta SCS Recharge-Free spinal cord stimulator is implanted in the body with wires to the spinal cord. The patient uses a handheld controller that sends just the right amount of stimulation to manage the pain when needed.
St. Luke’s Center for Neuroscience was an early adopter of the device.
“Traditionally, the previous Medtronic systems we put in were rechargeable batteries, so you had to, depending on your usage, recharge them every few days or so,” Rabin explained, “once again, depending on how much use the battery got.
“This newer system, you don’t have to charge it. It will last for so many years. I think they’re saying close to 10 years — again, it depends on usage.”
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Rabin said this is a great solution for certain patients “who have pain where you don’t see anything on an MRI or CT scan.”
“Then you kind of say, well maybe this is just pain that a person is having because of the way the brain signals are coming through the nerves and the rest of the body. In some of those patients, this can be a nice way of changing some of that signaling to the brain so the brain doesn’t interpret it as painful. And then, there are other patients that have had surgeries and injuries where they just haven’t responded the way we want them to respond.”