Back Pain & Sciatica

The back is a complicated structure of bones, joints, ligaments and muscles. You can sprain your ligaments, strain your muscles, rupture your discs, and irritate your joints, all of which can result in back pain.

Although sports injuries or accidents can cause back pain, picking up a pencil from the floor can also have painful effects , for example, in the simplest of movements. Moreover, back pain may be caused or complicated by arthritis, bad posture, obesity, and psychological stress.

What is It?
For many types of lower back pain and leg pain, epidural steroid injections (ESIs) are a common treatment choice. They have been used for decades and are considered an important part of sciatica and lower back pain nonsurgical treatment. The therapy involves directly injecting a local anesthetic and a steroid agent into the epidural space surrounding the spinal cord and nerve roots.

What Can It Treat?
If you have serious, difficult-to-treat pain from inflamed spinal nerves in your legs or arms, then an epidural steroid injection can give you rapid relief. Nerve passages sometimes narrow from the spine to your arms or legs, causing this discomfort. This narrowing may cause the spinal nerves to become inflamed.

What is It?
Injection of a lumbar transforaminal epidural steroid is minimally invasive and is a widely used form of treatment for lower back pain and radicular pain. Lumbar pain is characterized as pain that is felt in the lower back, although the buttocks, thighs, and legs can also radiate.

What Can It Treat?
Steroid injections have successfully been used to treat numerous conditions, which include:
– A herniated disc, which refers to a ruptured or bulging spinal disc
– Degenerative disc disease
– Degenerative lumbar spondylolisthesis, a condition that occurs when a spinal disc slips out of place and onto the disc below it
– Lumbar radiculopathy

What is It?
An injection of numbing medicine into the medial branches, or nerves that give sensation to the facet joints in the spine, is a lumbar medial branch block. The lumbar medial branch block can be used to diagnose and treat pain in the medial branches in the lumbar area of the spine or low back due to its numbing capabilities.

What Can It Treat?
Medial branch blocks are often treated for diseases affecting facet joints or damaged joints in the neck ( cervical region), upper back (thoracic region), and particularly lower back pain (lumbar region).

What is It?
Radiofrequency ablation, also referred to as rhizotomy, is a minimally invasive, nonsurgical technique that uses heat to reduce or avoid pain transmission. The radio frequency waves ablate the nerve that triggers the pain, or “burn,” effectively preventing the transmission to the brain of pain signals.

What Can It Treat?
Most specifically, this technique is used to treat chronic pain and disorders such as spine arthritis (spondylosis) and sacroiliitis. It is also used for treating pain in the spine, back, knee, pelvic and peripheral nerves. The advantages of radiofrequency ablation include: preventing surgery, rapid relief of pain, little or no recovery time, reduced need for pain medicine, enhanced function, and a faster return to work and other activities.

What is It?
Kyphoplasty is a way to treat fractures of vertebral compression, which are minor breaks in the thick bone mass that makes up the front portion of the vertebra (the vertebral body). Fractures of the vertebral body contribute to a vertebra ‘s collapse or compression, causing the spine to shorten and curve forward. This can result in pain and a kyphotic deformity (hunched-over)

What Can It Treat?
The normal rectangular shape of the bone gets squeezed when a vertebral body breaks, causing pain. The collapse of one or more vertebrae in the spine can involve these compression fractures and are a common consequence of osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a disorder that leads to a loss of normal bone density, mass and strength, leading to a condition in which bones become more and more fragile and easily susceptible to breakage. Vertebrae may become damaged by cancer as well.

What is It?
A treatment that masks pain signals before they enter the brain is spinal cord stimulation. A small device is inserted in the body to send electrical signals to the spinal cord, similar to a pacemaker. It allows people to control their symptoms of chronic pain better and to reduce the use of opioid drugs. If you suffer from chronic back, leg or arm pain and have not sought relief from other treatments, this could be an alternative.

What Can It Treat?
After nonsurgical pain management options have failed to offer adequate relief, spinal cord stimulation is used most frequently. Stimulators of the spinal cord can be used to treat or monitor various forms of chronic pain, including:

• Back pain, especially back pain that continues even after surgery (failed back surgery syndrome)
• Post-surgical pain Arachnoiditis (painful inflammation of the arachnoid, a thin membrane that covers the brain and spinal cord)
• Complex regional pain syndrome
• Pain after an amputation
• Visceral abdominal pain and perineal pain