Pain Management, epidural shots & burning nerve ends

Or her.

I just the nerve burn done about 2 months ago (L4/L5)
Hurts pretty bad for about 4 weeks but not as bad as the pain I was in before. After 4 weeks in my pain was all but gone and now I am virtually pain free. You still have to watch what you do because if you injure yourself further, you won't know/feel it.
I had bone spurs, slightly bulging disc and narrowing of the facet joints FWIW

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Doc say next time will have to fuse three disc.

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Thats serious business.

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Pain Management

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Crock of shite.

Get your diet and exercise routine under control. Went though a similar ordeal about 10 years ago. I cut out all wheat, all sugar, all dairy, all grains, and used a reverse hyper a couple times a week. I've been 95% pain free every since. I would be 100% but I've recently started to allow myself cheat days.

Every now and again I'll go off the rails and eat a large pizza or drink a bunch of beers but as long as I don't abuse it or make a habit of it, I don't have too many problems.

Mark Sisson's books are what I used to get the ball rolling.

Try it out, give it 30 days and see what happens. What do you have to lose?

It is called a Rhizotomy. Essentially, your spine has joints that allow for each level of the spine to move. These are called facet joints. These joints have a shitload of nerve endings all over and are often the pain generators. A preliminary test is done to see if your pain is facet related. This called a Medial Branch Block, whereby the physician will flood these nerves with medication to deaden the nerves temporarily. If your pain deceases after this procedure, then it is indicative that the facet are the pain generators. The Rhizotomy is the procedure that burns the nerves. Essentially the "connection" is severed and the facets cannot communicate pain to the brain. I have had this done and it is a good procedure. The downside is that the nerves will regenerate and the procedure will have to be repeated every year or so for several years. Go see Dr. Sean Graham or Dr. Joseph Turnipseed.

I used Dr. Belleau from the Bone and Joint Clinic with great results.

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Crock of shite.

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I'll disagree. I'm sure there are bad pain management docs out there, but a large portion of the failure is the failure of the patient to learn or accept that they'll never be pain free again- and that's something that's OK. It is normal to hurt a little.

What isn't normal is pain that prevents you from driving to work, walking to and from the kitchen, pain that alters your gait, or when it's associated with losing your bowels/bladder on yourself (not quite a comprehensive list).

Effective pain management starts with that. Then they add medications and physical therapy routines. As a last resort, they'll move on to surgery (unless indicated earlier) because surgery itself causes a lot of chronic pain.

A neurosurgeon who does a lot of pain management lectured us about chronic back pain once. He said, "Chronic pain is learned. And when it comes to treating it, it's like your ABC's. I can give you enough drugs to forget them for a little while, but you don't unlearn them. But the focus should be more on making you not think about them all the time." Or something to that effect.

Had a series of 3 epidurals about 2 weeks apart for L4/L%, worked great, no pain 10 months later. I realize that I was lucky, 2 brother-in-laws had no result from same procedure.

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Crock of shite

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Well maybe for some folks it has worked for me. I'm just trying to find out what the options are. I'm waiting on an appt. for another epidural at the moment. The shots do help me.