Facet Joint Injections

Facet Joint Injections in virginia

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.

Document your pain level (0-10) following the procedure below and bring it to your follow up appointment so that you and Dr. Bhatia can evaluate the efficacy of your procedure.

Notice

While we ARE accepting NEW patients for Interventional Pain Treatment options, we are UNABLE to accept NEW patients for OPIOID medication management at this time.

We are always committed to providing the most honest compassionate care possible to all our patients