You have a joint that’s painful, and you’re tired of waging a daily battle to get comfortable through medications. The next step up is to explore joint injections, an approach that may provide longer-lasting relief.
The team of musculoskeletal experts here at Valiant Life Medical offers different types of interventional injections, including joint and trigger point injections.
Here’s a look at our injections to help you choose one that’s best for your goals and needs.
Did you know that arthritis is a catchall term for more than 100 different diseases that lead to joint pain and inflammation? This explains why more than 92 million people in the United States report doctor-diagnosed arthritis or arthritis-like symptoms, which brings us back to pain and inflammation.
One of the frontline treatments for arthritis is corticosteroid injections that tackle both symptoms. First, the injection solution contains a steroid that reduces the inflammation. Second, it also contains a local anesthetic to provide near-immediate relief from the pain. Between reducing the discomfort and fighting off inflammation, these joint injections can help reestablish pain-free movement in your joint.
These types of joint injections can help you find weeks or months of relief, which also allows you time to take other steps for longer term joint health, such as physical therapy.
Another approach to joint pain comes in the form of regenerative medicine injections, including platelet-rich plasma therapy. The goal with regenerative medicine injections is to provide the soft tissue within your joint, such as your cartilage, ligaments, and tendons, with the resources they need to repair and rebuild themselves.
Regenerative medicine injections are a good option if you’re looking to find a sustainable solution for your joint issues, rather than stop-gap measures that address the symptoms.
Approximately 85% of people develop myofascial pain at some point in their lives. This type of pain involves the membranes that surround your muscles, which create trigger points (muscle knots) that lead to pain.
While not a direct joint issue, myofascial pain can affect the muscles surrounding a joint, making the area uncomfortable.
Through trigger point therapy, we can relieve the muscle tension to bring you relief. We inject a corticosteroid solution into the trigger point that we believe is responsible for your pain, and the solution causes the muscle knot to release.
We can also try dry needling, which means releasing the trigger point without medications — the simple act of inserting a needle can release the knot.
As you can see, there are several ways we can use injections to address your joint pain, and we’re happy to sit down with you to figure out which one is best for your circumstances.
To get started, please contact our office in Fort Worth, Texas, to set up a consultation.
