Perhaps back pain has been troubling you. Or maybe pain in a shoulder, hip, or leg is negatively affecting your quality of life. You start looking into options for relief. But you soon realize that some options come with serious trade-offs. Surgery, for example, makes permanent changes to the body and is not always successful. Drugs prescribed for musculoskeletal conditions tend only to numb rather than heal pain. And long-term use of such medications may lead to overuse and addiction.