Your joints form the connection between two or more bones and are designed to support your body’s mobility, allowing you to walk, climb, bend, type, and text. Every moveable bone in your body is part of a joint.
Unfortunately, the structure and function of your joints also makes them more susceptible to injury and damage that leads to joint pain. If you’re among the 30 million adults suffering from joint pain, you know how the discomfort disrupts your active lifestyle.
At Advanced Interventional Pain Management — with offices in Texarkana, Hot Springs, Little Rock, El Dorado, Arkadelphia, and Mena, Arkansas — our pain management specialists, Dr. Jacob Abraham , and Dr. Ryan Stuckey want you to get back to doing what you love.
Our physicians understand how joint pain affects quality of life, which is why we offer many advanced treatments for joint pain. Here, we want to share four of the most common procedures we perform for joint pain.
1. Ultrasound-guided injections
Joint injections are one of the first treatments we recommend for our patients suffering from chronic joint pain. These injections contain a mix of corticosteroids to reduce inflammation and a local anesthetic to provide immediate pain relief.
To improve accuracy and efficacy of our joint injections, we use advanced image guidance technology. For example, for our patients suffering from chronic knee pain from arthritis, we perform ultrasound-guided major joint injections.
For chronic back pain from facet joint disorder, we perform facet joint injections using fluoroscopic imaging.
2. Hyaluronic acid injections
If you fail to get relief from your knee pain after a joint injection, we may suggest treatment with hyaluronic acid. The injected hyaluronic acid is similar to the natural fluid produced in your joint.
Hyaluronic acid injections lubricate the joint and act as a shock absorber. Additionally, the gel-like injection may coat nerve endings in your knee to ease pain.
3. Nerve blocks
We also use nerve blocks to diagnose and treat joint pain. Like the joint injection, a nerve block contains an anti-inflammatory agent and a local anesthetic. However, we inject the medication so it bathes the nerve we suspect is causing your pain.
Nerve blocks work by turning off the pain signal that’s sent to your brain, easing your discomfort. We also use image guidance technology when performing nerve blocks to improve the accuracy of our injections.
For joint pain, we offer facet joint medial branch blocks (for back pain) and genicular nerve blocks (for knee pain). If you get significant relief from a nerve block, we may then recommend radiofrequency ablation for long-term relief from your joint pain.
We also perform sacroiliac joint injections to diagnose sacroiliac joint dysfunction, which is commonly misdiagnosed as back pain or hip pain.
4. Radiofrequency ablation
Radiofrequency ablation is a minimally invasive procedure that uses radiofrequency energy to destroy the nerve causing your joint pain. Pain relief following a radiofrequency ablation may last anywhere from nine months to two years. Some people even experience permanent pain relief.
We perform radiofrequency genicular joint neurotomy for knee pain, radiofrequency neurotomy of lumbar facets for back pain, and radiofrequency sacroiliac joint nerve ablation for sacroiliac joint pain.
Joint pain is common and debilitating, but it doesn’t have to dictate how you live your life. Let our experts help you get relief from your joint pain. Call the office nearest you or request an appointment online today.