Can Epidural Steroid Injections Help Relieve My Low Back Pain?

There's nothing like low back pain to really slow you down and limit your life, as the millions of Americans with the condition can tell you. Nearly 40% of adults in the United States experience back pain.

If you want to regain the freedom of moving without pain, it may be time to look into epidural steroid injections.

As experts in pain management and spine health, the team at Apex Pain Specialists, including Dr. Naveen Reddy and Dr. Maziar Massrour, offers nonsurgical solutions that can restore your quality of life as quickly as possible. And this perfectly describes what epidural steroid injections can do for many people who are struggling with lower back pain. Let’s take a look.

Many roads to lower back pain

We want to first start with the types of lower back pain that an epidural steroid injection can address. Where epidural steroid injections shine is with degenerative issues that lead to nerve compression, which include:

• Herniated discs
• Degenerative disc disease (DDD)
• Sciatica
• Lumbar spinal stenosis

Many people with low back pain also experience pain that radiates down one side of their buttocks and legs. If this sounds familiar, you’ll be happy to learn that an epidural steroid injection can often remedy this leg discomfort, too.

What we accomplish with an epidural steroid injection

Now let’s turn our attention to how epidural steroid injections work to relieve your pain. Your epidural space is an area between the covering around the spinal cord and the vertebral canal and it extends from the base of your skull to your sacrum. 

This space also contains the 31 pairs of nerve roots, including five lumbar pairs, that exit your spinal cord to form the peripheral nerves in the lower extremities. So, this space is often ground zero when it comes to your low back pain.

It often makes sense to focus our pain management efforts on these nerve roots, therefore, especially when the low back pain is due to nerve compression, as it often is.

Once we identify the nerve roots that are involved in your low back pain, we inject a solution of steroid and local anesthetic into the area to reduce inflammation and calm the nerve activity.

To do this, we use live X-ray (fluoroscopy) to guide our needle and, once in position, we inject contrast to ensure proper flow, we then carefully administer the injection and you’re free to go home afterward.

Beyond low back pain

The bottom line is that if you’re looking for the path of least resistance for degenerative and chronic low back pain, an epidural steroid injection may very well fit the bill.

To figure out whether you might benefit from an epidural for your back pain, or another treatment option, please call our office in Chandler, Arizona, today at 480-820-7246. You can also book an appointment online.