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WASHINGTON, D.C. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Thousands of patients every year experience pain months, even years, after having a surgery or trauma. Now a new procedure can eliminate the hurt, numbness and burning sensations that some people experience after the OR.
Harry Freedman is an avid cyclist. When the weather's bad outside, he brings his ride inside; but for a few years, pain forced him to stop peddling.
"It was debilitating," Freedman told Ivanhoe. "It was hard for me to work. It was hard for me to sleep. You know, it's just hard to live."
A bulldozer ran over him at work, severing his leg.
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"The tires are five feet tall and he hit me with one of the tires," Freedman said.
Harry lived in agony for a year.
"Let's say there's a storm and the telephone pole falls down and there's a live wire sparking on the road, that's what it feels like," Freedman recalled the incident.
Ivica Ducic, M.D., Ph.D., a plastic surgeon at Georgetown University Hospital in
Washington, D.C., helped to ease Freedman's pain with a procedure he developed called peripheral nerve surgery.
"I'm after the source of the pain," Dr. Ducic explained to Ivanhoe.
Dr. Ducic removed the damaged part of the nerve and implanted it into the muscle, basically protecting the end of the nerve so it won't grow back and it won't cause any more pain.
"The cause is the painful terminal end of the nerve," Dr. Ducic said.
The procedure is for anyone who's had surgery and who's also experienced pain for at least six months and drugs have failed. After 17 surgeries and several different medications, peripheral nerve surgery was one of Freedman's last options and it worked.
"That pain that I had that was so terrible is gone," Freedman said.
Now nothing is stopping him.
Dr. Ducic has performed this outpatient procedure 55 times over the last 18 months and says the procedure has an 85 to 90 percent success rate.
For additional research on this article, click here.
To read Ivanhoe's full-length interview with Dr. Ducic, click here.
Sign up for a free weekly e-mail on Medical Breakthroughs called First to Know by clicking here.
If this story or any other Ivanhoe story has impacted your life or prompted you or someone you know to seek or change treatments, please let us know by contacting Melissa Medalie at mmedalie@ivanhoe.com.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Georgetown University Hospital
Department of Plastic Surgery
(202) 444-8929
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
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