Imagine feeling an army of ants continuously crawling up your legs, or constant shocks spiralling down your lower limbs.
Or waking up to what feels like having been whipped in the face. This is what Pio Mangion felt when he stirred from his sleep one morning in 1998.
“I woke up and felt like someone had whipped me on the right side of my face. I was prescribed 13 pills every day, but the pain never subsided until I underwent treatment at the pain clinic in 2003,” he said.
But soon after, the pain started encroaching on the other side of his face, Mr Mangion, now 70, said yesterday, just before he underwent pain relief treatment, at the clinic in Mater Dei Hospital.
The intervention on Mr Mangion’s face, called pulsed radiofrequency, lasted around 30 minutes. This technology is used to treat chronic and postoperative pain and soft tissue wounds, among others.
The clinic has for the past 13 years provided pain management for acute and chronic painful conditions, including low back, shoulder and neck pain, diabetic neuropathies and cancer pain. Treatment procedures at the clinic include the use of electrically sheeted needles and radio frequency generators, which are special machines that create an electrical field to “reset” the nerve.
Marilyn Casha, a specialist anaesthetist at the clinic, sees more than 50 outpatients weekly. Between 30 and 35 of these require pain relief interventions.
Dr Casha believes not all pain is easy to locate and she works with her team to find its origin and rehabilitate people so that they can get back to their everyday life.
“When someone develops some sort of pain, they refer to the family doctor, and then seek relief in medicine. Anxiety sets in when the person realises the pain is still there, and as time goes by they cut themselves off from the daily work routine. That’s where the clinic comes in,” she smiled.
Dr Casha admitted that constant agonising pain sometimes reflected negatively on the person’s personality, and therefore pain management required some psychological background.
She added that the clinic’s visiting consultant service made it easier for patients to seek a second opinion.
One such visiting consultant is Charles Gauci who left for the UK in 1978, but has been visiting the island since 2004, and plans on returning for good next year.
The first Maltese consultant in pain relief, Dr Gauci has written several papers on chronic pain management and gives lectures about these techniques across the world.
In the meantime, work at the clinic keeps advancing as the pain management field adapts to new challenges.
Last week the clinic performed Malta’s first dorsal column stimulator intervention, which is the implantation of an electronic device used to help treat chronic pain.
Health Minister Joe Cassar, who yesterday visited the clinic, said one of the challenges was the increasingly ageing population that boosted the number of chronic pain patients.
Pain in numbers
20 per cent of patients referred to the clinic suffer from cancer pain.
72 per cent of the pain treated at the clinic is back pain.
1,200 pain relief procedures were carried out in 2011.