Epidural injections, I think everybody has heard of them but most people do not understand them what they do. Even people who perform them, I don’t think they. Completely understand what they do. Epidural steroid injections, are injecting steroids, which is a very potent anti-inflammatory and usually, the steroids are long-acting, they’re going to act in the spine for weeks. And what we want to do is to reach these nerves that are coming out, these are the nerves that are going to be pinched on by the herniated discs either in the neck or the low back and they’re going to be irritated, they’re going to be swollen, they’re going to be angry, we want to calm them down with a steroid.
When those nerves are swollen they’re fat and therefore the impingement of the disc is even worse. It’s like biting the inside of your cheek, when you bite the inside of your cheek you get swollen then you keep biting on it. So you can’t get rid of it. So that’s the purpose of the steroid, however, most people do the epidural injections from this approach, from the middle, okay? Which cannot always reach these nerves on the side, because remember that there’s a disc that is impinging on it so it might prevent the spread of the steroid. So the transforaminal injection, what they do is, we go from the side and we target the specific nerve. I see it makes sense, actually. That seems to make more sense than going the other way. We get much better results with that approach.
That’s another taboo procedure where the patient can be asleep, they don’t have to be awake, they don’t have to feel any of this. Whenever we say asleep, we’re not talking about the general anesthetic, we’re just talking about sedation because I know a lot of people are scared of being under “under, under”.
We don’t do general anesthesia, we sedate the patient with a type of sedation that is very quick to get in and also very quick to get out. So the patients are usually functional within 15, 20 minutes and they cannot drive home because that’s the law but they’re going to be wide awake and hungry and ready to have lunch. Call us at 813.421.3411.
(Transcript from the video, transcribed but not reviewed)
