Facet Joint Injections
PROCEDURES
Facet Joint Injections
Medial Branc Nerve Blocks
A medial branch nerve block (MBB) serves as a precursor to determine whether the source of your chronic neck or lower back pain is secondary to arthritis of the facet joints in your spine. This condition is also known as spondylosis. Medial branch nerve supplies the innervation to the facet joint and hence blocking this nerve allows us to determine whether the joint degeneration/arthritis/inflammation is the source of your pain or not. This procedure purely serves diagnostic information and the relief of pain after undergoing this procedure is not expected to last more than 8 hours which is the duration of action of anesthetic used to block the nerve.
If a patient experiences more than 80% relief of their ongoing pain, then it is considered a successful outcome to consider proceeding with radiofrequency ablation (RFA) of the nerves to lengthen the relief of pain.
Please note: Most commercial insurance companies and Medicare require successful outcomes with 2 sets of diagnostic medial branch nerve blocks to rule out false positive or placebo effect from the first block. In most circumstances, they must be scheduled 2 weeks apart as per payor requirements and protocols.
Please ask Dr. Bhatia any additional questions you may have.