| Editorial | There are various causes for back pain and the follow- ing pathophysiology has been widely reported. Recently, there has been a study that suggested epidural adhesion as a potential cause for back pain [1], and there have been new approaches for the treatment of back pain. There are numerous methods to treat patients with back pain, such as physical therapy, pharmacotherapy, nerve block, folk remedies and so on, the list is vast in variety. A treatment method that is applied to spinal pain patients called neuro- plasty, is one of the many examples. The basic concept of neuroplasty is that the cause of back pain comes from the adhesion and inflammation in the epidural space with stimulating the nerve roots, and by removing the cause of adhesion and reducing the inflammation, the pain can be removed. This type of treatment began with epidural ad- hesiolysis,which was designed by Racz in 1989, FDA ap- proved in 1995, and performed with the widely used Racz Catheter [2,3]. Afterwards, similar instruments, such as the Navi catheter, were developed in order to control the direction of the catheter during procedures, and to be more effective in adhesiolysis. Such methods were in- troducedunder the title of neuroplasty. According to the reports regarding neuroplasty, it is very useful tool of treatment for the patients with changes in nerve function due to neural inflammation that is caused by nerve stimulation from disc herniation, as well as for Korean J Pain 2012 April; Vol. 25, No. 2: 73-74 pISSN 2005-9159 eISSN 2093-0569 http://dx.doi.org/10.3344/kjp.2012.25.2.73 Neuroplasty Pain Clinic, Konyang University Hospital, Daejeon, Korea Dae Hyun Jo, MD patients with nerve irritation due to epidural adhesion after spine surgery. The catheter can be inserted into the lesion area, which may alleviate pain when detaching the adhe- sion, and may also allow for the direct administration of medication to the lesion,so that the source of pain can be removed,resulting in the ease of back pain. There was re- search conducted on patients with chronic back pain from failed back surgery syndrome and spinal stenosis, where one group was treated with the administration of steroids in the epidural space, and the other group was treated with percutaneous epidural adhesiolysis [4,5]. The results showed that the group treated with percutaneous epidural adhe- siolysisexperienced a consistent reduction in pain and im- provementwith function disability compared to the group only on steroids. Also, there were far better results in the employment of patients and the use of narcotic analgesics. Recently, especially in Korea, many hospitals are per- forming a lot of epidural neuroplastywhich is helpful for- many patients with back pain, but there is still a need for a more detailed evaluation on patient satisfaction regard- ing cost-benefit and long term efficacy. Neuroplasty has a low possibility for complications and has excellent ef- fects, but its use is limited to patients with a severe degree of adhesion, which makes adhesiolysis difficult with one catheter, or to patients with limits in catheter insertion due to severe spinal stenosis and huge disc herniation. Therefore, Received March 15, 2012. Accepted March 19, 2012. Correspondence to: Dae Hyun Jo, MD Pain Clinic, Konyang University Hospital, 685, Gasoowon-dong, Seo-gu, Daejeon 302-718, Korea Tel: ＋82-42-600-9294, Fax: ＋82-42-600-9090, E-mail: pandjo@paran.com This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Copyright ⓒ The Korean Pain Society, 2012