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Neuroscience
  

Back Pain Relief

LOS ANGELES (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Millions of Americans live with back and sciatica pain each day. Medication, therapy, even surgery doesn't help. Now one man's invention may ease your pain.

A car accident threatened to cut Sachs' career short. For two years she lived in pain. Sachs' problem wasn't something she could just wash away. She describes the pain as "intense" saying, "It was like a constant, throbbing, shooting pain that just never subsided."

Neurosurgeon Aaron Filler, M.D., Ph.D., of the Cedars-Sinai Institute of Spinal Disorders in Los Angeles, is behind the cutting-edge technology that helped Sachs. He developed the Magnetic Resonance Neurography or MRN.

Filler says, "This is the ability to image nerves inside the human body." MRN is really just an MRI scan finely tuned to highlight nerves -- something that has never been done before. Before the MRN, doctors would not have been able to see this. Sachs says, "You could actually see in the MRN where my problem was. They could actually see the nerve trapping the muscle."

This new nerve imaging technology helped Dr. Filler diagnose Sachs' pain as Piriformis Syndrome. Filler explains the syndrome as a muscle in the pelvis, called the piriformis muscle, which crosses over the sciatic nerve and goes into chronic spasm and causes buttock and leg pain.

"I would walk around holding my buttocks saying, 'It feels like it's an unhappy nerve,'" says Sachs. But with Dr. Filler's help Sachs' problem was solved and her life and job continued with no more pain.

Dr. Filler believes the new MRN can diagnose 90 percent to 95 percent of sciatica patients who couldn't be diagnosed by current methods. For more information on the MRN, check out doctor filler's new book; Do You Really Need Back Surgery?

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