Living with chronic pain is bad news year-round. Unfortunately, people who suffer from chronic pain tend to report flareups around the holiday season. Between busy schedules and the stress generally associated with holiday celebrations, chronic pain can be made worse. But in the aftermath of all those holiday celebrations, what can chronic pain patients do to manage? Injection therapies are an option.
Lone Star Pain Medicine is a Weatherford, TX pain clinic offering treatments considered alternatives to long-term pain medication and invasive surgery. For example, one of their treatments for chronic back pain is the facet joint injection. This treatment is an injection therapy designed to alleviate the pain of facet joint syndrome by blocking pain signals.
Injection therapies are generally designed to do one of three things:
- Block pain signals
- Reduce/prevent inflammation
- Encourage the body’s natural healing response.
Many of the injection therapies offered by pain specialists are designed to offer both pain-blocking and inflammation-reducing benefits. As for encouraging the body’s natural healing response, such is the goal of regenerative therapies like stem cell and PRP injections.
As an Alternative to Medication
Injection therapies are not always the most appropriate course of action. But when they can be effectively utilized to reduce dependence on pain medication, it is generally a good thing. One need only consider the ongoing opioid crisis to understand why.
Pain medications are, by their nature, limited in what they can do. Furthermore, the body adjusts to them. Chronic pain sufferers who attempt to manage their pain only through the use of prescription medications find themselves having to routinely go back to their doctors as the effectiveness of their current medication regime wears off.
Some prescription pain medications are riskier in terms of dependence. But even those that do not carry a high dependency risk have side effects. A person cannot take prescription drugs year after year and expect to get away without any side effects whatsoever.
Injection therapies offer an alternative to long-term medication. They can have side effects of their own, but such side effects tend to be less pronounced. In most cases, the only side effect from an injection therapy is a bit of soreness at the side of the injection itself.
As an Alternative to Surgery
Managing chronic pain by resorting to invasive surgery is always tricky. That is why surgery is considered a method of last resort. Potential downsides include little to no pain relief and future complications. For some people, going under the knife just is not worth the risk.
Imagine agreeing to back surgery in hopes of relieving facet joint pain. Imagine recovering from that surgery only to discover that it has not helped. Not only are you still in pain, but now you worry that there may be future complications. This sort of thing does not happen with every case of surgery, but it is always a possibility.
As an alternative, injection therapies give patients an opportunity to try a less invasive treatment option. Injection therapies are minimally invasive in that they only involve a needle. Their biggest risk tends to be the risk of infection, though infection is always a possibility when you are talking injections or surgical procedures.
An Option to Consider
With another holiday season now over, chronic pain sufferers are left to deal with the aftermath of so much activity. If you suffer from chronic pain, consider injection therapies. They are but one more option to add to your existing list of choices. Injection therapies administered by trained pain doctors could actually be just what you need to relieve your pain.
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