Your spine is extremely complex, composed of bones, joints, nerves, ligaments, and many other structures. Considering how you depend on your spine for most of your activities, it’s no surprise that roughly 80% of people have back pain at some point during their life.
For many people, those painful symptoms begin in the joints that separate each pair of spine bones. The team at Superior Pain Relief offers facet joint injections to help relieve joint-related pain and inflammation, helping patients get back to the activities they enjoy.
In this post, Zaid Malik, MD, provides a brief overview of facet joint pain and how injections could help relieve your chronic back pain.
Most people know their spine is made up of a series of bones called vertebrae — from the neck all the way down to the very lower back. This structure provides a conduit for nerves traveling from the brain to every other part of the body.
But what many people don’t think about is that your spine is also full of joints. In fact, there’s a joint between each pair of vertebrae. These joints are called facet joints, and together, they provide your spine, and your body, with flexibility and movement.
Just like joints elsewhere in your body, facet joints in your spine are subject to wear and tear, strain, injury, inflammation, and other problems that can interfere with their movement. Many people develop arthritis in their facet joints as they get older, a common cause of chronic back pain.
In addition to chronic discomfort in your back, inflammation associated with facet joint problems can also irritate or press on nerves as they exit your spine, leading to pain, numbness, or other unusual symptoms in different parts of your body.
Facet joint injections have a dual purpose: First, they can treat and relieve pain and inflammation around the joint, and second, they can help diagnose the cause of facet joint pain.
For diagnosis, Dr. Malik injects medication into the area surrounding the joint. If the injections relieve or decrease your symptoms, then he knows your facet joints are the source of your pain; if they don’t provide relief, he typically orders additional testing to find the cause.
For pain treatment, facet joint injections use medicine to anesthetize or numb the nerves causing painful sensations. In addition, corticosteroids help relieve inflammation that leads to nerve impingement and irritation for long-term pain relief.
For facet injections, we use special imaging techniques to visualize your spine in real time. This imaging ensures that administering the injections is extremely precise and accurate.
Prior to injections, Dr. Malik numbs the area with a local anesthetic to keep you comfortable. The injection process itself takes less than a half-hour, and it’s performed on an outpatient basis.
Afterward, you can resume most of your regular activities within a day or two, but it’s a good idea to avoid strenuous activity or heavy lifting during the early healing period. Over-the-counter pain medicine and ice packs help relieve temporary discomfort around the injection site.
Facet joint injections can provide long-lasting relief for chronic back pain due to arthritis and other causes. Best of all, our team can repeat the injections when needed to maintain your results.
If you have chronic back pain, we have solutions that can help. To learn more about facet joint injections and other therapies for chronic pain, request an appointment online or over the phone with Dr. Malik and the team at Superior Pain Relief in Houston, Baytown, Willis, and The Woodlands, Texas, today.
