PITTSBURGH -- Millions of Americans live in chronic pain and many have spent years undergoing treatments and surgeries in a search for relief.

Chronic Pain Doctor Enters Pain Medicine Field For Personal Reason UPMC Pain Medicine Program Web Site

Now a new procedure developed at the UPMC Pain Medicine Center is helping many of those patients live a normal life.

Dr. Doris Cope runs UPMC's Pain Medicine Center and developed a technique called pulse radiofrequency of the dorsal root ganglia.

"Radio frequency is a very noninterventional way to destroy pain fibers, rather than trying to surgically excise," Cope said.

She's been using the procedure successfully to treat back pain, but Richard Bosco was the first patient she used it on for neck pain.

Bosco was forced to give up bow hunting, golfing, running and, eventually, his career as an oral surgeon -- all because of severe chronic neck pain.

"I was pretty much a basket case. You think of suicide … you think of everything -- and I thought of all that," Bosco said.

Bosco had a herniated disk pressing on his spine.

He avoided surgery for several years, but finally the pain was just too much.

"I thought I'd have the surgery done and then that's the end of the neck thing," Bosco said.

The surgery provided some relief, but eventually the pain returned.

That's when he went to UPMC's Pain Medicine Center.

With the patient sedated, Cope targets a small needle attached to a machine deep into the nerves around the spine.

"What we're trying to get is not the motor or sensory, but the tiny c-pain fibers that do neither motor or sensor but transmit pain to the spinal cord and to the brain," Cope said.

The nerve is heated to 42 degrees for about two minutes.

"I liken this to jamming radar. You stun the nerve. You don't kill the nerve you stun it -- you jam the radar," Cope said.

Patients feel immediate pain relief and walk out of the clinic a few hours later with just a Band-Aid.

The procedure gave Bosco his life back.

"I don't have the grueling, hard, increasing neck pain that I had for years. I can go nine holes to a round and feel pretty good," Bosco said.

Doctors at the UPMC Pain Medicine Center evaluate patients and try to find ways to help them function with less pain.

For more information about the pain clinic, call 412-784-5119.