The patients who struggle with back pain might benefit from different treatment methods, including epidural injections. If you have various chronic pain conditions, these sorts of injections can relieve your pain for months at a time. The experts who specialize in treating pain, like Dr. Hui Kang in Houston, can use epidural injections to help patients who suffer from many different painful medical conditions. Epidural injections are much more versatile than a lot of people think, and these treatments can change the lives of countless patients.
Pain Conditions and Epidural Injections
Epidural injections are frequently used to help reduce the extreme pain that occurs during the labor process. Given how intense this sort of pain is, it’s clear that epidural injections can have dramatic effects. Epidural injections can certainly be used in other situations. There are patients who do experience particularly powerful levels of pain on a regular basis.
Bone spurs can lead to very significant levels of pain, which is also the case for herniated discs. In severe cases, pinched nerves and sciatica can cause similar problems. If you’re recovering from spinal surgery or a related procedure, getting epidural injections could help you heal more effectively. Epidural injections have a lot of unique benefits, even when compared with many other pain relief medications.
Effective Epidural Injections
Plenty of types of pain medication these days are used to specifically address inflammation. Many types of medicine are anti-inflammatory in nature. Epidural injections can sometimes be even more effective at controlling inflammation since they will target the inflammation in the affected areas of the body directly. Some chemicals and proteins might also be contributing to the inflammation levels that the patient is experiencing, and the epidural injections can be used to at least partly remove these abnormalities.
Epidural injections have a unique composition. They’re made using cortisone and anesthetics. The anesthetic is used to help numb the pain. While the cortisone component of the injection won’t necessarily cause any dramatic results right away, its effects can be more significant. The cortisone is used to control the inflammation.
Pain itself is complex, and epidural injections were built to reflect the more complicated physiological aspects of chronic pain. The pain itself has immediate consequences, and it causes plenty of additional effects that will only worsen the overall problem. Epidural injections are capable of addressing the issue at both levels. Not all chronic pain patients will be able to take epidural injections, but they can certainly be a good choice for plenty of individuals.
Receiving Epidural Injections
There are patients who have allergies that will prevent them from being able to use epidural injections. Fortunately, these sorts of allergies are rare, even among the people who suffer from multiple allergies. If you have any problems with blood clotting or uncontrolled diabetes, epidural injections also might not be an option for you. Patients who are fighting off infections also won’t be able to take these injections.
However, epidural injections can still help many other chronic pain patients. These injections are often effective for three months or more. If you’re used to taking pain medication every single day without getting any results, these injections might seem even more impressive. Pain specialists will discuss epidural injections with their patients, helping everyone involved decide if these are the right treatments.