Jeffrey A. Brown, M.D.
Neurological Surgery, P.C.
600 Northern Blvd., Suite 118
Great Neck, NY 11021
516-478-0008
http://www.neurosurgeryli.com/dr.brown.html
Transcript: Postherpetic neuralgia: When medications and injections no longer work
Postherpetic neuralgia, shingles, burning pain that comes after a bunch of blisters that appeared on your face, the blisters are gone but now you’re left with burning pain.
What’s done for it? Well, you’ll see a pain doctor and they’ll put you on a number of medications over the course of a very long period of time.
What’s a long period of time? The definition of postherpetic neuralgia is that you’ve had it for half a year at least.
What if after that you’ve tried all the medicines, all the injections and nothing’s working. What’s left? Well there is something left and that is motor cortex stimulation.
Motor cortex stimulation is an operation based simply on a concept that the shingles, the virus, has injured the nerve, the trigeminal nerve, in such a way that it’s like pulling a spark plug out of the engine that’s your brain. And what we do with motor cortex stimulation is stick a spark plug back in. So when your engine was running rough, you feel it as burning. At least you call it burning. The brain doesn’t know what to call it and that’s the word we assign to it. And by stimulating the brain, we kind of slow down the hyperactivity and the switching center of your brain called the thalamus so it doesn’t burn any longer. It can be very effective. There’s no absolute statistic for postherpetic neuralgia cause not enough people have undergone it in any one series but in my series of patients with facial pain, there have been very good results sometimes even complete pain relief in patients specifically with this entity.