Back Pain Device Produces Orgasms

W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 7 -- All he was trying to do wasease her chronic back pain, but when Dr. Stuart Meloy placed anelectrode into one patient’s back, she groaned.

Not in pain, but in delight.

“She said, ‘You’re going to haveto teach my husband how to do that,’” Meloy, ananesthesiologist and pain specialist in Winston-Salem, N.C., said in a telephone interview.

Meloy had stumbled onto an unexpected side effect of thepain device he was using — an ability to cause orgasm.

He has just patented this unexpected use of the device, aspinal cord stimulator made by device company Medtronic. Now heis trying to talk Minneapolis-based Medtronic into testing andmarketing the device for this use.

A Routine Operation

It all started with a relatively routine operation forMeloy, who was trying to help a patient with severe anduntreatable back pain.

“She had had a number of back surgeries for degenerativedisk disease and fusion surgery,” Meloy said.

He was trying Medtronic’s spinal cord stimulator to see ifit might work in her case. “These people are either suffering alot or there is certainly a place for narcotics to be used.”

The surgeon has to place an electrode very precisely in thepatient’s spine. The idea is to find the specific nerve bundlethat is carrying his or her pain signals to the brain.

It requires some trial and error and sometimes, Meloy said,the surgeon hurts a patient, who will groan or cry out.

She Made a 'Different' Sound

At first he thought this had happened with this patient.

“But the sound that she made was a little bit different. Iasked her what it was,” he said. That was when she recommendedhe teach her husband the technique.

“The next day in the operating room, the nurses were allasking me how one gets that,” Meloy deadpanned.

Meloy said he repositioned the electrode and was able tohelp the patient’s pain. “We able to reduce her narcotics usageby about a half,” he said.