Some exciting news for those who deal with and treat chronic pain. A team of doctors in Australia have tested a device to treat chronic pain with very positive results. The device is implanted along a patient’s spinal cord and can mask the body’s pain signals with its own signals.

Researchers are excited not only because it could help patients who are in pain, but it could cut down on the use of painkillers which have dangerous side effects and the potential for addiction.

How does the device work? It reads pain signals from the nerves and can send out its own electrical pulses to find the pain points and “replace” the pain with tingling pulses. The brain gets confused and instead of the patient feeling pain in that area they feel a slight, not unpleasant, tingling. The implant can adjust its strength to the level that the patient sets it to. Previously tested devices did not have this feature and if a patient moved the wrong way or their heart rate went up the electrical pulses could go up to a high level and the patient would feel almost an electrical shock. Now they are in control.

One of the patients who tested the implant said his pain level has significantly dropped after thirty years of chronic back pain. So far, the relief does not come cheap. The developer of the device, Saluda Medical, said currently it will cost about $30,000.

The researchers say they still have a lot of testing to do but they are optimistic about the use of this device for other things like Parkinson’s disease.