After suffering from neck and back pain so piercing that some days she would just sit in the office in agony, Leah Weinberg recently tried a radical new treatment: Her doctor implanted a small battery-operated generator in her lower back that sends a weak electrical current to the nerves near her spine. It tricks the brain, replacing her pain signals with what she describes as a tingling sensation.

The procedure, performed at Columbia University Medical Center, is known as peripheral-nerve stimulation. It's one of a number of new treatment techniques for people like Ms. Weinberg who suffer from chronic pain and have failed to find lasting relief from other therapies, such as narcotic painkillers, physical therapy and acupuncture.

Some 76.5 million Americans, or about 26% of all adults, suffer from chronic pain, generally defined as any pain that lasts more than six months. Medical experts say the condition can be as debilitating as many severe diseases, leaving the patient exhausted and unable to carry on with many everyday activities.

Ms. Weinberg, a 34-year-old from New York City, describes a decade of pain after an auto accident "that made me feel like I was in the body of a 90-year old woman." During this time, she became dependent on Vicodin, a painkiller medication that left her with sharp mood swings and little appetite.

"Unless you live with chronic pain, you can't imagine how it feels," Ms. Weinberg says. "I will always be living with some pain, but now at least I feel I can control it." When she has pain, she says, she uses a remote device to control the current from the implanted generator.

"Without adequate treatment, this pain and suffering can be expected to continue throughout life, preventing the patient from working or performing many activities of daily living," says neurosurgeon Christopher Winfree, the head of the pain medicine center at Columbia University Medical Center who implanted Ms. Weinberg's device.

The new therapies, some of which have been borrowed from the field of anesthesiology, mostly share a goal of preventing pain signals from reaching the brain. Implantable devices, such as the one Ms. Weinberg received, are intended to stimulate nerves to mask pain. Nerve stimulation also can be achieved by attaching electrodes on the outside of the skin, for instance at the knee, to deliver a low-voltage electrical current. Another technique, known as facet joint denervation involves inactivating nerves in the joints that enable the spine to bend and twist, such as in the neck, by passing radio waves via needles inserted through the skin to heat the tissue at the tip of a joint. Other devices and procedures deliver drugs directly to the site of pain, such as nerve blocks, which use injections to numb nerves including in a shoulder or arm.

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