After more than twenty years under Dr. Keith Javery's care at Grand Rapids Pain, Jeanie’s pain finally became manageable with a cervical spinal cord stimulator, and she now tells every patient who will listen that it's worth trying.
The camera starts rolling, and Jeanie doesn't hesitate. Across the room, Dr. Javery leans forward the way he has in countless appointments before this one, and asks her the kind of question he doesn't usually get to ask out loud: what would she tell someone else in her position? For a woman who has spent more than two decades working through chronic pain with the same doctor, the answer is already waiting.
'Over twenty,' she says, when he mentions how long she's been his patient. It isn't a complaint. It sounds, if anything, like pride.
Twenty Years in the Same Room
Jeanie has been seeing Dr. Javery for more than twenty years, long enough that the two of them have a kind of shorthand most patients never get the chance to build with a doctor. For a long stretch of that time, injections were the answer. They worked, and they kept her moving.
Chronic pain rarely stays solved forever, though, and at some point Dr. Javery saw something in Jeanie's case that called for a different approach: a cervical spinal cord stimulator, a small device designed to interrupt pain signals in the neck before they ever reach the brain. It wasn't a replacement for everything that came before it. It was the next tool in a toolkit he'd been building with her for years.
'I've been seeing you over twenty years. The shots were great, and then you found the stimulator that worked best for me.'
A New Kind of Tool for an Old Pain
A cervical spinal cord stimulator is a small, implanted device that sends mild electrical signals to the nerves near the spine. Instead of masking pain with medication, it works by changing the way pain signals travel to the brain in the first place. At Grand Rapids Pain, this kind of neuromodulation isn't treated as a last resort after everything else has failed. It's positioned as a modern, long-term option for patients whose neck and head pain hasn't fully responded to injections or other conservative care.
For Jeanie, that shift happened in 2017, when she moved from the shots she'd relied on for years to a device built specifically for her kind of pain.
Try It First, Decide Later
One detail tends to surprise patients who are considering a spinal cord stimulator for the first time: nobody wakes up with a permanent implant. Every patient at Grand Rapids Pain starts with a spinal cord stimulator trial, a short, reversible test using a temporary external device. As Veritas Health's spine-health.com explains, the trial exists to confirm that stimulation actually reduces a patient's pain before anyone commits to permanent implantation, and it's generally considered successful once a patient reports more than fifty percent pain relief along with real improvement in daily function. Nothing about the trial week commits a patient to anything further.
That honesty matters, because it's exactly what Jeanie wanted other patients to hear. Most people who try the trial do go on to choose the permanent device. A 2025 real-world study published in the Journal of Pain Research followed 505 patients through this exact process and found that 86.1% achieved trial success, with 77.0% proceeding to permanent implantation. The numbers back up what Dr. Javery has seen across his own career: when the trial works, most patients choose to keep going.
If you're weighing the same decision Jeanie once faced, our team can walk you through what a trial actually involves.
Low Pain, Finally Manageable
Nine years in, Jeanie's results speak for themselves. She describes the change simply, without exaggeration.
'I went from being in so much pain to where there was low pain, which was manageable.'
It isn't a story about pain disappearing entirely. It's a story about pain becoming something she could actually live around, which is often the more honest and more durable goal of interventional pain care.
What Jeanie Tells Every Patient Who Asks
Ask Jeanie what she'd say to someone on the fence about a spinal cord stimulator, and she doesn't soften it.
'I would recommend the stimulator for anybody. Try it, and if you don't like it, you don't have to have it. But I would recommend it to anybody in the world. It works.'
Her story joins a growing list of spinal cord stimulator reviews from patients at Grand Rapids Pain, nearly all of them built around the same idea: relief that lasts, built on a decision patients get to test before they ever have to fully commit to it.
Back in the Room
By the end of the interview, there isn't much left to say. Dr. Javery tells her it looks like the stimulator worked. Jeanie agrees, simply and without hesitation. 'I'm really happy for you, Jeanie,' he tells her, and she thanks him, the same way she probably has at the end of a hundred other appointments over twenty years.
If you've spent years searching for a pain management clinic near me that treats chronic pain with more than the same repeated round of medication, Jeanie's answer is worth sitting with: try it, see how it feels, and decide from there. Schedule an appointment with the team at Grand Rapids Pain to find out whether a cervical spinal cord stimulator could do for you what it did for her.
This blog is intended for general informational purposes. Any health-related information shared is not meant to provide or replace professional medical advice and does not establish a patient-provider relationship. Individual outcomes vary. If you are experiencing a medical emergency, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.
