Pain Management

Types of injections | Injections used

Pain is the number one reason people seek out a physician. Back and neck pain in particular will affect 80% of Americans at some point in their lives.

What are the types of injections

A pain management physician may use a variety of different injections in the course of your treatment. Injection therapy is both therapeutic and diagnostic.

Injections play a diagnostic role in that the physician will observe how your pain symptoms respond to a specific injection. Even if the injection fails to relieve pain, the injection process will provide more information back to the pain specialist that may lead the physician to a type of injection, or a treatment recommendation, that does work for you.

Injections play a therapeutic role in that they can relieve pain symptoms either permanently, or at least long enough for you to progress into a therapy program that then strengthens muscles and ligaments so they are resistant to a recurrence of pain.

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Some of the injections used include:

Epidural Injections:Used to treat neck, arm, back or leg pain caused by nerve irritation from within the spine, typically caused by bone or disc abnormalities.

Selective Nerve Root Blocks: precision injection used to diagnose and treat leg or arm pain caused by irritation of a particular spinal nerve.

Facet Injections: Used to diagnose and treat neck or back pain caused by arthritis of the facet joints of the spine.

Facet Joint Neurotomy: A procedure which coagulates the nerves providing sensation to the facet joint, allowing for long term relief of headache, back, and neck pain from facet arthritis.

Sympathetic Block: Used to treat pain conditions which involve overactivity of the sympathetic nervous system.

Percutaneous Sympathectomy: The coagulation of sympathetic nerves contributing to chronic pain, allowing for long term relief.

Botox Injections: An effective way to treat migraine headaches, and some conditions involving painful muscle spasms.

Discography: A specialized test to confirm precisely which spinal discs are causing pain, and whether tears or internal degeneration are also part of the problem.

Percutaneous Disc Procedures: Some painful disc conditions can be treated without surgery. Treatments using Dekompressor, IDET, and Nucleoplasty products are available. Your physician can discuss whether such treatments are appropriate for your condition, and what are the best treatment options.

Sacroiliac Injections: Low back pain can come from the sacroiliac joint. Test injections into the SI joint can both diagnose and treat this condition.

Vertebroplasty: Sudden onset of severe back pain can indicate a vertebral compression fracture, especially if the spine is weak from osteoporosis. This condition can be treated by placing a special type of cement into the vertebra to strengthen and stabilize the bone.

Spinal Stimulation: If spinal and leg/arm pain persist despite treatment, nerve dysfunction may be the cause. Spinal stimulation is the precision placement of electrodes within the spine to “mask” the pain. Surgery is not required to test this treatment option. This “spinal pacemaker” relieves pain without the use of medications, or their side-effects.

Intrathecal Infusion Therapy: Medications placed directly into the spinal fluid can be a thousand times more potent than administered by other means. Smaller doses of medications can achieve better pain relief with fewer side effects. When all other treatments have failed to provide pain relief, spinal infusion may be the best option.

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