If you suffer from persistent pain in your low back, mid back, legs, or neck, the team at Performance Pain and Sports Medicine might recommend epidural steroid injections (ESIs) to manage your symptoms.
Under the leadership of Dr. Suzanne Manzi and Dr. Matthias Wiederholz, we use ESIs to support patients with persistent pain from our locations in Lawrenceville and Raritan, New Jersey, and Houston, Texas.
Here’s what we want our new and existing patients to understand about epidural injections.
Epidural injections are meant to give you relief from persistent pain. If you have a condition like spinal stenosis, disc degeneration, or a herniated disc, epidural injections can soothe persistent pain symptoms.
Your injection delivers a dose of steroid-based pain medication to the area of your spine where your pain is, including the cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral areas of your spine. We can target pain symptoms in your neck, mid back, or low back or buttocks with ESIs.
Our team at Performance Pain and Sports Medicine uses X-rays to guide and target your injections. We thoroughly clean the area of your injection, and use a local anesthetic to prevent discomfort.
ESIs deposit pain- and inflammation-relieving medication into the epidural space of your spine. Immediately, the steroid and anesthetic agents in your injection go to work, reducing inflammation in the targeted area and interrupting pain signals from reaching your brain, giving you fast symptom relief.
Our team at Performance Pain and Sports Medicine uses the most conservative approaches possible to address your persistent back, neck, or leg pain. We may recommend treatments and options like physical therapy in combination with ESIs to address your underlying condition as well as your pain symptoms.
ESI treatment offers a minimally invasive, non-surgical path to pain relief. You won’t need extensive downtime after an injection procedure, and can drive yourself home or back to work after your appointment.
ESI treatment has a high success rate, with studies showing that 54-80% of patients receiving cervical spine ESIs enjoyed significant improvement of pain symptoms lasting from six months to two years after a series of 3-6 injection treatments. Patients receiving lumbar spine injections also showed lasting improvements in pain levels and functionality after a series of treatments.
While ESIs can provide real help, we recommend that you limit this procedure to a few injections a year, due to the chance that you could experience side effects as a result of prolonged steroid use. Steroids can weaken your spinal bones, cause skin thinning or loss of skin color, facial flushing, insomnia, and blood sugar issues.
Your provider at Performance Pain and Sports Medicine monitors your treatment to ensure that you don’t suffer adverse effects from ESI therapy.
To find out if an epidural injection could help you recover from persistent pain and if you’re a good candidate for this procedure, get in touch with the Performance Pain and Sports Medicine team today. Schedule your initial consultation by calling our office most convenient to you or requesting an appointment online anytime.
