Treating Chronic Pain With Injections
Pain management plans are typically individually designed and tailored based on the causes of your symptoms and on your overall health condition. One group of management techniques often used by practitioners is treatment through injections. Injections have the advantage of targeting the problem area directly without affecting the entire organism. There are several types of injections that your practitioner may use.
Facet Joint Treatment
If the source of your pain is in your facet joint, facet joint injections of anti-inflammatory steroids and long-lasting local anesthetic can provide relief that lasts for a long time. If the relief is effective but does not last long enough, facet rhizotomy injections may be a good alternative. Facet rhizotomy injections relieve pain by completely blocking the sensory nerve connected with the facet joint.
Steroid Injections
Another common treatment is the epidural steroid injection. A mix of long-acting local anesthetic and anti-inflammatory steroid is injected into the supporting tissue around the spine. If your condition includes lumbar or cervical radiculopathy, transforaminal epidural injection may also be needed together with the steroid injection. The mix of steroids, anesthetic and sometimes other pain reducing drugs is also used to treat pain in the sacroiliac joints via injection.
Nerve Root Treatment
Selective nerve root injections are used both for diagnostic purposes and for pain management when the source of nerve root pain needs to be pinpointed. There are two mechanisms for producing the nerve block via injection. The first uses a long-acting anesthetic to block the pain; if it proves effective, it has served its purpose in reducing pain and also located the source of the pain. The other way involves injecting a neurolytic such as alcohol or phenol, which destroys the targeted nerves.
Using injections to relieve pain on a long-term or permanent basis has several advantages. Injections often prove more effective than oral pain medications, because the pain relievers are administered directly to the problem site and are more concentrated. Relief also lasts longer, since the anesthetic and anti-inflammatory drugs used in injections are designed to be long-lasting. At the same time, injections are a far less risky and invasive option than surgery.
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