Living with pain can affect every area of your life, both physically and emotionally. For many people, pain injections have proven to offer relief and improve their quality of life. Specialists at the Pain Management Center at Cooper are highly skilled at pinpointing the location of your pain and using pain injections to alleviate your discomfort.
Pain Injections: Our Approach
We give injections of steroids, with or without a small amount of anesthetic, to relieve pain and inflammation in more than 40 areas throughout the body. Some of these areas include:
- Hips, shoulders, and other joints to treat arthritis pain
- Epidural space, which surrounds, supports, and cushions the spine, to relieve neck, back, or leg pain
- Sacroiliac joint, located between the bottom of the spine and the pelvis, to relieve pain that spreads from the buttocks or back to the legs
- Trigger points throughout the body to manage myofascial pain that tightened bands of muscular tissue cause in specific muscle groups
Doctors may also use neurolytic injections, consisting of alcohol or other chemicals, to intentionally destroy nerves that are causing pain. Our specialists give these injections where needed throughout the body.
Pain injections may only be part of a multidisciplinary approach to your care. Read more about our pain management treatments.
What to Expect During an Injection
An injection is an outpatient procedure that only takes a few minutes. We perform the treatment with you sitting or lying down in a comfortable position. During the procedure, our specialists:
- Clean the skin with an antiseptic to reduce the risk of infection
- Apply local anesthesia to the skin
- Give moderate intravenous sedation to relax you
- Use ultrasound or X-ray fluoroscopy, which show real-time images on a monitor, to pinpoint exactly where to place the needle
- Inject a small amount of steroid once the needle is in position
Doctors may need to perform the injection more than once for you to experience pain relief. The risks of a pain injection are small but include infection, bleeding, worsening of pain, and nerve damage. We minimize these risks by performing a thorough medical evaluation before the procedure.
Contact Us
To learn more about the Pain Management Center at Cooper or to schedule an appointment, please call 856.963.6770.
Refer a Patient
Referring physicians are welcome to call us any time at 856.963.6770 with questions or concerns about a shared patient or to refer a patient to our care. Learn more about pain management referrals.