Injections can be used in two basic ways. Most commonly, they are given in the hopes that they will fix a problem, such as make pain go away. But another way that doctors sometimes use an injection is to test an idea about what is causing something. For example, if the doctor thinks a certain joint in the low back is causing most of a patient’s back pain, they may inject that joint with a numbing mediation. If the pain goes away for a short time while the medicine is there, but comes right back when the medicine wears off, that helps confirm that the joint is causing the pain. On the other hand, if the pain doesn’t go away even while the joint is numb, something else must be causing it. I recommend that anyone keep a journal of the effects of any injections they get for the first 24 hours after each injection, because even injections given for other reasons sometimes have diagnostic information like this at the beginning and unfortunately it is almost never captured in the medial records. Countless times I’ve seen patients that have had large numbers of injections in their spine over years, and if i only knew how they felt 2 hours after a specific injection I would have been able to know if surgery was an option, but of course they can’t remember that, so we have to do the injection again, even though we know they didn’t have lasting relief the first time.
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