From Trouble Walking to Touring the World: A Patient Perspective
Barbara M. had booked the trip of a lifetime: a river cruise. She was excited to stroll the avenues and byways of Europe’s most beautiful cities alongside her husband, until severe knee pain from osteoarthritis threatened not only the trip but the ability to keep up her active lifestyle.
After learning from her orthopedist that she would eventually need a partial knee replacement, she’d tried an intra-articular injection – a steroid shot into the joint capsule at her knee – to extend the time before surgery.
It worked for a while, Barbara says, but the pain kept coming back. And the date of her dream trip kept getting closer.
Meanwhile, everyday activities became hard to do, as well.
“The most painful things for me to do with my knee pain is walk and stand – especially stand,” Barbara said. An avid pickleball player, she dreamed of enjoying the sport pain-free again.
When she heard about COOLIEF® Cooled Radiofrequency Ablation, she was excited to give it a try. Radiofrequency ablation (RFA) can relieve pain by using radio waves to damage nerves and stop them from sending pain signals back to the spinal cord and brain.[i]
For patients diagnosed with osteoarthritis of the knee, study results conclude that COOLIEF Cooled RF provides significantly greater and longer-lasting pain relief, improved physical function, and higher patient satisfaction than intra-articular steroid injections.[ii]
First, Barbara spoke to a doctor who performed RFA with COOLIEF Cooled RF. The doctor told her she would need to have a diagnostic procedure to determine whether treatment with COOLIEF would work. The diagnostic uses a local anesthetic (numbing) nerve block. If this temporary solution caused a large reduction in the pain, then it was likely that treatment with COOLIEF Cooled RF would reduce pain for a longer time.[iii]
Hopeful, Barbara scheduled the diagnostic nerve block. “And I had really good results from that,” she said, so she scheduled the COOLIEF procedure with her doctor.
On the day of her appointment at an outpatient clinic, her doctor gave her another local anesthetic to numb the area before using COOLIEF. After he finished and cleared her for release, Barbara’s husband drove her home.
The doctor had told her she might need to put ice on the area afterward and possibly take some over-the-counter pain medicine.
“I didn’t put ice on it,” Barbara said. “I didn’t have any pain.”
The next day, she was out on the pickleball court, playing with friends. Better than that, she had no problem keeping up with her river cruise tour group as they took in the sights of continental Europe. She even got in a dance or two with her husband at the end of a long day of walking.
While COOLIEF won’t be the right solution for everyone,[iv] Barbara recommends anyone with osteoarthritis-related knee pain that hasn’t responded well to other treatment talk to a doctor. Check out the free tool on this site to find a COOLIEF-trained specialist and find out if COOLIEF Cooled RF is right for you.
References
[i] Radiofrequency Ablation for Pain Management. Cleveland Clinic. Last reviewed March 14, 2022. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/17411-radiofrequency-ablation.
[ii] A Prospective, Multi-Center, Randomized Clinical Trial Evaluating the Safety and Effectiveness of Using COOLIEF® Cooled Radiofrequency Probe to Create Lesions of the Genicular Nerves and Comparing Corticosteroid Injection in the Management of Knee Pain. Avanos Medical, Inc. November 30, 2016.
[iii] Lee DW, Pritzlaff S, Jung MJ et al. Latest Evidence-Based Application for Radiofrequency Neurotomy (LEARN): Best Practice Guidelines from the American Society of Pain and Neuroscience (ASPN). J Pain Res 2021;14:2807-2831. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8436449/.
[iv] Carlone AG, Grothaus O, Jacobs C & Duncan ST. Is Cooled Radiofrequency Genicular Nerve Block and Ablation a Viable Option for the Treatment of Knee Osteoarthritis? Arthroplasty Today 2021;7:220-224. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352344120302417.
