Patient Safety Awareness Week begins next week, March 8-14^th, and the team at Southwest Spine and Pain Center wants to take part in this initiative by educating patients on ways to stay safe at home, at the office and with their prescription pain medication. Continue reading for more information on how chronic pain sufferers can stay safe in everyday life!

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If you’re chronic pain is especially debilitating, you may need to seek the help of others with cooking, cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping and traveling to and from the doctor’s office. Consider trying to manage a few of these tasks on your own, and if you encounter days that are particularly painful, try developing a schedule divvying up some of the responsibilities with family...

An inversion table is a padded, foldable chair-like device that claims to alleviate low back pain. If you have not seen or used an inversion table before, they work a little something like this: the person using the device straps him or herself onto the table and allows the table to slowly flip him or her over. This is the “inversion” point of the process that is supposed to relieve pressure from your bones, joints and vertebral discs.

Inversion therapy does carry some risks though, primarily because it requires hanging upside down to achieve pain-relieving results. Therefore, individuals who have high blood pressure, heart disease or glaucoma are encouraged to proceed devices like these with caution because they can cause an unsafe rise in pressure.

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Face pain, or trigeminal neuralgia, is usually caused by a nerve disorder that creates electric-shock-like pain throughout the lower face and jaw, and/or anywhere near the nose, ears, eyes or lips. Patients suffering from this condition usually describe the pain as “intense” or “burning.” According to Medical News Today, roughly 45,000 people in the U.S. and one million people worldwide have trigeminal neuralgia. Additionally, this chronic condition is twice as common in women and rarely affects people under the age of 40.

The pain management physicians at Southwest Spine and Pain Center provide a plethora of therapies to treat neuropathy pain. If you’re experiencing intense facial pain, or are enduring other chronic pain-like symptoms, consider seeing a Southwest Spine...

There are a number of situations that can create and/or exacerbate back pain: poor posture, walking in heels, sleeping on an old, uncomfortable mattress, etc. Regardless of the reason, back pain is largely preventable and can be avoided by making relatively easy lifestyle changes. The team at Southwest Spine and Pain Center is addressing the five most common causes of back pain and what to do if you’ve already fallen victim to the condition.

Although athletes and active adults (i.e. adults who work out 4-5 days a week) run the risk of injuring their backs during a game or workout, generally speaking it’s the sedentary individuals who have the highest risk of developing back pain. Low back pain has become increasingly common in the United States and according to the National...