Pain Management Myth Busters

Pain management in the United States is big business. Well over 100 million individuals suffer from chronic pain, and the problem costs well over $500 billion annually. There are quite a few mis-perceptions in the field of pain management. Period here are a few of them described

1. Narcotics are always bad. Each year, there are over 15,000 overdose fatalities from narcotics and there is plenty of bad press on a weekly basis regarding narcotic pill mill medical practices. So a significant amount of the general population looks at narcotics as always being a bad thing. However, they definitely have their place in the management of pain. In the patient with cancer for instance, they can make the end-of-life much more tolerable than living last few months in horrific pain. In patients who do not have a surgical option for their chronic pain, narcotics other types of pain management along with can allow patients to work, and enjoy functional lives play with their children. So narcotics do in fact have a place in the treatment of patients dealing with acute and some types of chronic pain.

2. An MRI will always give you a diagnosis for back pain. It is interesting to note that even with the best medical minds, in this day and age only 50% of patients can receive a true definitive diagnosis for why they are having back pain. This include patients who have had a complete musculoskeletal workup which includes a history, physical examination, x-rays, and even an MRI. So an MRI is not always the go to trustworthy part of the workup.

3. Surgery fixes most back pain. Often times there is truly no cure for a person's back pain. Spinal fusion surgery in the United States has increased 15 fold over the last 10 years and the population has not increased by that much. So more and more surgery is being performed, and the results from back surgery for a lot of procedures are very suspect.

4. Only 3 steroid injections are allowed annually. Pain management doctors are all over the board with regards to how many steroid injections they will do on any given patient per year. When looking at this scientifically, there really is no hard and fast rule. With the steroid being injected into a focal area, the medicine and stays in that area and very little of it actually gets into the bloodstream. So in fact more than 3 story injections can be given each year, and we really do not know how many injections are actually okay to perform.

5. All pain management involves narcotic medications. This is truly a myth. Modern pain management involves a comprehensive approach to the treatment of back pain. This includes such treatments as physical therapy, chiropractic treatment, along with interventional pain management such as epidural injections, facet injections, or potentially trigger point injections. This comprehensive approach allows significant pain relief without narcotics.