Spine Diagnostics
A Bridge to Destination
The field of medicine revolves around making a timely diagnosis and initiating a proven treatment plan. No treatment is 100% successful, but correct diagnosis is paramount in achieving better results.
Symptoms, whether it is pain, numbness or weakness related to neck or back pain, are “hints” about the underlying problems. Physical examination adds to these hints to narrow down possible reasons for pain to a handful. X-rays and MRI add further to information and gets your doctor closer to the diagnosis.
Although MRI is considered a gold standard to find the cause of spinal pain in the majority of cases, it is vital to know that even normal healthy people who do not suffer from neck or back pain or sciatica have a degenerative or herniated disc almost 30-35% of the times. The odds of making a false diagnosis are high when abnormal findings are so common.
Spine Diagnostics is an area of interventional pain medicine where small doses of Novocaine-steroids are injected at certain targets to confirm a possible diagnosis. These test injections also carry the risks of false positive or negative responses, but overall, along with the MRI findings, they add to the accuracy of diagnosis.
Certain diagnostic injections carry a high chance of confirming or disproving a potential cause of pain, like diagnostic sacroiliac joint injections or selective nerve root blocks. In this section, we will focus on some of the commonly performed diagnostic interventions for spine. Non-spinal diagnostic injections, like vehicular nerve block or intercostal nerve blocks are covered in other sections of our website. For more information, consult our interventional spine specialists.
Pertinent Spine Diagnostic Interventions
- Selective Nerve Block
- Medial Branch Block
- Sacroiliac Joint Injection
- Piriformis Injection
- Discogram/Discography
