Are you suffering from facet joint pain? Try to answer the following questions. Are you suffering from back pain or neck pain that is not going up to your fingers or toes? Does your neck or back pain moves up to shoulder or buttock? Does your pain increase with backward movement and turning around? If your answer is yes for all the questions, you are probably suffering from facet joint pain.
Diseases in the Facet joint are one of the main reasons of the spinal pain (neck pain, back pain, low back pain). Survey shows that facet joint pain is responsible for 15-45% of low back pain, 42-48% of back pain, 54-68% of neck pain in general population.
In most of the cases this problem cannot be correctly diagnosed because of inconsistent results of imaging techniques. Only when the problem gets worse the facet joint arthropathy can be seen in X-ray, CT Scan, and MRI. Again, facet joint arthropathy in these imaging does not mean that they are responsible for pain.
The gold standard in diagnosis of facet joint pain is diagnostic facet joint block. It is very simple; local anesthetic drug is injected into your facet joint or nerve supplying the joint. If your pain is relieved then you are suffering from facet joint pain.
Now it is diagnosed that you are suffering from facet joint pain. Question is: how to solve this problem? Mainly there are two processes to solve this problem. Firstly, we can give local Anaesthetic and Depo-steroid injection into the facet joint. In the second process Medial Branch nerve that supplies the facet joint is blocked or ablated.
In the first process your pain will be relieved, but you can't get long-term relief. The second one is more effective than the first one. Here Radio Frequency Generator is used either to ablate the nerve with conventional radio frequency, or pain signal is blocked with pulsed radio frequency without any damage of the nerve.
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