Does back or neck pain follow you no matter what you do? Untreated pain can drain you, making it difficult to concentrate or sour your mood. Managing your pain actively day after day or night after night takes up too much of your time, energy, and patience.
Persistent pain problems need long-lasting pain relief treatments. Pain injections are one type of treatment that, in many cases, results in long-term pain relief. Even if pain injections only work temporarily for you, they may allow your doctor to learn about the underlying problem causing your pain, so that you can say goodbye to your symptoms for good.
At the Total Spine Institute, Dr. Andrew Fox and Dr. Ryan Mattie offer several types of pain injections. With locations in Sherman Oaks and Calabasas, California, we care for new and existing pain patients. How could pain injections improve your back or neck pain symptoms? Let’s take a look at the potential long-term benefits of this interventional pain management approach.
At the Total Spine Institute, we use pain injections to address a wide range of pain conditions related to issues with your spine. We may recommend pain injections if you suffer from neck or back pain relating to pinched spinal nerves, a herniated spinal disc, degenerative disc disease, spinal stenosis/narrowing, or arthritis.
Often, it’s time to try pain injections when initial rounds of conservative treatments and responses haven’t worked well enough to give you relief. If rest, over-the-counter pain medications, and targeted stretches or exercises aren’t doing enough for you, you may be a good candidate for injection therapy.
Your provider at the Total Spine Institute performs your injection with ultrasound guidance, precisely targeting the area of your spine where issues like nerve compression or inflammation result in persistent pain felt in your back, neck, lower back, buttocks, or radiating through your limbs. You may need an epidural steroid injection, facet joint injections targeting the connections between your spinal bones, or sacroiliac joint injections at the bottom of your spine.
Pain injections can provide lasting relief for back or neck pain. We may also be able to use pain injections to pinpoint the specific area of your spine that needs treatment to improve your symptoms. Several different types of pain injections may be helpful. The duration of your results depends on the type of pain injection.
We use nerve block injections containing a fast-acting local anesthetic to numb a specific area for a short time. This can help diagnose the location and cause of your pain. Your pain relief is immediate, but not typically very long-lasting. Nerve blocks mainly serve a diagnostic duration.
For longer-lasting results, corticosteroid pain injections target inflammation. This treatment may fully resolve chronic back pain. The pain relief results can last for multiple months and, in many cases, be permanent.
It may make the most sense to combine a local anesthetic with steroid medication in your injection, stopping your pain right away and also providing ongoing pain relief. You may also benefit from regenerative platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections for natural healing.
To learn more about your options for long-lasting pain relief with pain injections, contact the Total Spine Institute online or over the phone today to schedule your initial consultation appointment.
