Do Neck spinal injections work?
Hello
We have been seeing people with neck pain for years, by the time they come to us, they have tried a lot of therapies. Most haven’t worked.
Today we are going to look at one of the options available. Spinal epidural injections of the Neck.
This is when they inject painkillers and anesthetics in or around the nerves of your neck to give some pain relief for neck pain and pinched nerves of the neck.
The study we are going to look at is systematic review. This is when they look over all the studies that have been done on something, in this case, neck injections.
The name of the study is“Systematic review of the effectiveness of cervical epidurals in the management of chronic neck pain.”
The study examined three randomized controlled trials.
They found that “All three trials showed positiveresults for short-term pain relieffor, “patients with radicular symptoms had the best pain relief and in contradiction to those with axial neck painless than six months”. Meaning that those with pain caused by pinched nerves did better than those without.
“83% had successful pain relief after three months; and 41.4% of patients had excellent pain relief six months post-injection.”
So, it only seems to work well for 3 months. The longer there after the less effective it is. And likely you will be encouraged to go have more injections again, and again and again.
Just like having to take more painkillers, all the while your problems get worse and like many of the clients we see, the injections stop working and they land up by us anyway.
Do you want to keep having to go back for more injections and pills? OR do you want to try something different?
Jason
