By decreasing your wait times to be seen by our interventional pain management specialists, you will promptly receive the most appropriate treatment tailored specifically to your pain management needs. Here are some benefits of interventional care:
1. Avoid and/or limit medication management. All medications have the risk of adverse side effects and in the long run, can cause detrimental permanent effects to your liver, stomach and kidneys. Medications, in the short term, can help you recover from your acute pain but if the pain persists for more than several weeks medications become a crutch that can be hard to overcome as well. In the end, medications help you cope and “take the edge off” your pain but do not help much in diagnosing or even treating the specific cause of your pain.
2. Avoid the need for surgery. Nobody wants to have surgery. Interventional therapies can alleviate your pain, diagnose the cause of your pain and potentially fix the cause of your pain avoiding the need for unwanted and possibly unneeded surgery. Even if the procedure only helps short term, it can lead to a diagnosis that will help determine the best treatment for you.
3. Provide a diagnosis. Each procedure helps to support and/or disprove a potential cause of your pain. If you have improvement in your pain after a procedure, this can help us determine where your pain is coming from. On the flip side, if you gain no improvement after the procedure, then the specific area that was injected is unlikely the cause of your pain. In the long run, if you have to have surgery, this can help the surgeon to target what needs to be operated on if an injection helped improve your pain.
4. This can treat the problem and potentially heal your pain. There have been a number of patients who only have one injection and can have pain relief for years. If this alleviates your pain, you may be able to avoid having surgery and also reduce or completely eliminate the need for pain medications.
5. Relief in minutes. Typically the majority of injections take less than 3 minutes. The total visit from the time you are checked in for your procedure to the time you leave normally is only 15 minutes long. The majority of patients will have immediate relief with the remaining individuals having significant relief within a couple of days.