Trigeminal neuralgia is one of the harder types of nerve pain for doctors to treat. While pain can be pretty accurately tracked to your trigeminal nerve channels, the cause of the pain — whether constriction, over-stimulation, tumors or lesions — can make treatment tricky. As a result, you may have turned to alternative medicine modalities when typical nerve pain medications have failed to adequately address your pain.
Acupuncture is a leading form of alternative treatment for trigeminal neuralgia, but if it fails to help, you may be feeling at a total loss to determine the appropriate next steps.
Fortunately, other treatment options are available when your trigeminal neuralgia acupuncture protocol fails. And although surgical intervention may feel extreme or scary to face, you may be able to achieve far higher levels of relief than you have through medication or alternative procedures.
Microvascular Decompression after Trigeminal Neuralgia Acupuncture Fails
Microvascular decompression is often the first procedure discussed between neurosurgeons and trigeminal neuralgia sufferers. When you have determined that your trigeminal neuralgia acupuncture treatments have failed, you can then take steps to learning more about how a procedure like microvascular decompression may help.
Microvascular decompression may be appropriate to consider if the cause of your trigeminal neuralgia has been determined as impingement on the nerve by nearby blood vessels. Basically, this impingement means your trigeminal nerve is constantly being pressed upon, which then shoots continuous waves of pain through your face that other treatments may be unable to control. During the decompression surgery, anything pressing on the nerve will be separated from it, allowing the nerve to begin functioning normally.
Gamma Knife Radiosurgery after Trigeminal Neuralgia Acupuncture Fails
If the source of your trigeminal nerve pain is not impingement, or if microvascular decompression is not the right response to your trigeminal neuralgia for other reasons, Gamma Knife Radiosurgery may be considered. During this procedure, you will be placed in a head frame, and multiple beams of focused radiation will target the area or areas along your trigeminal nerve path that are thought to be the source of your pain.
This surgical procedure may be especially appropriate for those with bilateral trigeminal neuralgia to pursue if their trigeminal neuralgia acupuncture protocol fails to achieve relief.
Other Types of Surgical Intervention for Trigeminal Neuralgia
Although trigeminal neuralgia may prove hard to treat, neurosurgeons have additional offerings that may enable patients to achieve partial or full pain cessation or relief. Trigeminal surgery options to consider include percutaneous rhizotomy, which uses a special needle to apply heat and destroy the malfunctioning location along your trigeminal nerve channel or the placement of a pain stimulator. Pain stimulators “pace” the pain center by stimulating the offending nerve and interrupting the normal flow of pain signals. Once placed, it’s programmed specifically to suit your needs as a patient so you can achieve optimal pain relief.
Deciding to End Trigeminal Neuralgia Acupuncture And Pursue Other Options
Change is hard and nowhere is that truer than in the medical realm. Acupuncture, while offering some relief to certain trigeminal neuralgia patients, is simply not an effective treatment for all sufferers. You may be encouraged to continue attending acupuncture appointments where different needle placements may – or just as likely may not – attain relief from trigeminal neuralgia pain.
It’s important to make the distinction, however, between a course of treatment that achieves growing relief over a series of appointments, and a failed treatment protocol, where no further results are attained and future appointments will simply cost more time and money without any positive result.
Carefully chart the course of your non-surgical trigeminal neuralgia treatments, using the same Wong-Baker pain faces measurement scale used in many hospital and institutional settings. If your pain levels do continually decrease over time, you may determine that it is better to hold off on surgical intervention. But when your pain levels are static or worsening, you’ll know that it’s time to make a change and seek relief by working with a neurosurgeon to determine the best response given your very individual experience of pain.
Because trigeminal pain may be extremely debilitating, you may find it hard to determine whether you are actually experiencing any positive outcomes with non-surgical interventions.
When your everyday demands are out of reach because of your trigeminal neuralgia, you may need to depend on your personal support system of family and friends to give you realistic feedback of how they see trigeminal neuralgia damaging your life. This feedback may pair with your own pain ratings to enable the change between seeking alternative medicine solutions and considering surgical interventions.
Neurosurgeons and Trigeminal Neuralgia
Once you stop trigeminal neuralgia acupuncture treatments and find a neurosurgeon, you’ll form a relationship with both the surgeon and his overall team to determine the best path forward for your disease. Even if you’ve had imaging done in the past, you may be sent for new imaging.
Your treatments leading up to the consideration of surgery may indeed have had some impact on your trigeminal nerve circuitry and channel that your surgeon will need to be aware of before surgery. Once the totality of your trigeminal neuralgia circumstances have been considered, a new treatment plan will be agreed upon and you will soon be on the path toward a procedure that may spell the end of your trigeminal pain.
