Even though many hospitals are not currently performing “elective” surgery, that should not affect patients with trigeminal neuralgia. If you have severe facial pain which is not controlled with medication, that is NOT an “elective” situation. We are open for business and will see you promptly, either in person or via a telemedicine appointment.
Tag: curing facial pain
What to do if you can’t get help with your facial pain?
It’s simple. Call my office! I’ll see you within a week and will do my best to help you.
What is dental nerve injury pain?
Rarely, a nerve in the mouth may be injured during a dental procedure, like a tooth extraction or a root canal. This leads to the immediate onset of a constant, burning, or aching pain in the distribution of the trigeminal nerve supplying that tooth, including the face. There is often some numbness.
This is NOT trigeminal neuralgia. It is rarely relieved by the medications, like carbamazepine, that are so effective for trigeminal neuralgia. This type of pain is NOT treatable with neurosurgical procedures like microvascular decompression, radio frequency lesion, or radiosurgery. Nerve burning procedures, like RFL, may actually make this kind of pain worse!
Oral surgeons may be able to help. Otherwise, pain management is the best option.
What is Postherpetic Neuralgia?
Herpes zoster is a virus that causes chicken pox in childhood. In adult life, if it recurs, it causes “shingles”, an outbreak of small lesions on the skin. They usually occur in the distribution of a nerve root. If the nerve root is the trigeminal nerve, the outbreak will occur on the face, usually in V1, the forehead and eye. The outbreak is painful. If you have this you should seek immediate medical attention, since early drug treatment can prevent chronic pain.
About 10% of people with a zoster infection develop chronic pain in that distribution. It’s called “postherpetic neuralgia.” The best medical treatments involve topical application of capsaicin cream. It burns, a lot. But if you use it for 2-3 weeks the postherpetic pain often diminishes.
If your pain is totally incapacitating, you may be a candidate for an operation called the “nucleus caudalis dorsal root entry zone lesion (DREZL) procedure. This involves surgery, under general anesthesia, where a needle is placed into the pain center of the brainstem and lesions are made. At UF, we have performed many of these procedures.
Radiosurgery – Is it the right choice?
Radiosurgery is an outpatient treatment that focuses hundreds of very small beams of radiation on an intracranial lesion. It has revolutionized the treatment of small brain tumors (including metastatic tumors, meningiomas, schwannomas, and others) as well as brain blood vessel malformations. It has also been used for some time to treat trigeminal neuralgia.
If you are considering radio surgery, make sure that you are dealing with a very experienced radiosurgery team. The trigeminal nerve target is very small, so absolute accuracy is required and this is not available on every commercial radiosurgery system. I would recommend systems that use a head ring and have a proven mechanical accuracy of less than .5mm.
I have used radiosurgery to treat over 4500 patients since we first started in 1988. We have extensively published our results (over 150 papers and chapters) and spoken at over a 100 international and national meetings. I was president of the International Stereotactic Radiosurgery Society. And yet I am not very enthusiastic about radiosurgery for trigeminal neuralgia. Why?
- It takes 6-8 weeks for radiosurgery to produce pain relief. Many of my patients can’t wait that long.
- Many patients still need to take medication after radiosurgery to control their pain. Why is that a problem. Well, side effects of medical treatment are what bring most patients to surgical treatment. If you have to continue meds, disabling side effects may also continue.
- Radiosurgery has a poorer long term pain control record than microvascular decompression. That is, your pain relief is more likely to be temporary than with other surgical approaches.
That said, the advantage of radiosurgery is that it virtually eliminates the rare but occasionally very serious risks of open surgery. If radiosurgery fails, it will not preclude you from pursuing other options.
So, think about it!