.jpg)
Dr. Aguila explains how he can effectively treat patients with Postherpetic Neuralgia (PHN), a painful condition that develops after Shingles. Conventional thinking was that patients with PHN had to live with the pain. But Dr. Aguila has successfully operated on patients from all over the U.S. Watch to learn more about overcoming Postherpetic Neuralgia.
Demetrio Aguila MD explains:
“Postherpetic Neuralgia is a whole bunch of words from Greek that most people think man that's a bunch of words from Greek, I'm not sure what that means.
Neuralgia is pain of the nerves post herpetic post means after herpetic means after some kind of disease that causes vesicles so
like chickenpox or more specifically in this case shingles.
The classical teaching is that post herpetic neuralgia is the result of
these viruses that live in the nerve root okay right by the spinal cord and that they pop out over the course this one nerve to cause a rash and then you end up with chronic pain.”
Dr. Aguila developed a surgical treatment to eliminate pain from Postherpetic Neuralgia. It started with one patient years ago.
“He came to me in pain and said doc you helped my friend so and so with his problem that that nobody else could figure out can't you do the same thing for me?
I gave him a nerve block injection to the affected nerves. I didn’t think it would work.
He comes back a couple weeks later and he says to me Doc I had a few hours of relief it was awesome.
Well doc you said if you turned off the nerve successfully with the injection you could turn it off permanently with surgery. When are we going to do my surgery?
I said sir I don't know if the surgery is going to help you or not as a
matter of fact I'm pretty sure it won't risk if you think there's any chance that the surgery is going to help then please do it he said it's kind of like chemo right there are certain chemo treatments that patients undergo and you know that the chance that they're going to be cured is really small but the patients do the chemo anyway and the doctor gives them the chemo anyway.
In the operating room, I resected neuromas on the damaged nerves.
To this day 8 years later he's pain free.
What that taught me and what all the others that I've seen taught me is that while it's true that that virus lives in the nerve root and it's true that the rash that comes along the course of that nerve causes shingles and while it's true that the shingles causes this chronic pain in some patients, I think the conventional understanding of post herpetic neuralgia is incomplete.
What the surgery confirms is that when you disconnect that nerve
you disconnect that nerve from the pain generator for people with post herpetic neuralgia there is hope.”
Dr. Demetrio Aguila Facebook
Comments