Today in the clinic, patient Zhang mentioned this problem to me, which may be a question in the minds of many pain patients. With the help of the online platform, I’ll explain it to you all in a unified way!
Today, Zhang came to the pain clinic again, but this time it was not his own pain, he brought his neighbor in the neighborhood to “treat pain”. The pain doctor gave him a local injection treatment. He thought that this injection would only last for ten days and a half months at most, and when the effect of the drug had worn off, he would have to come back for the injection. What I didn’t expect was that with one local injection, there was no more pain for more than three months. Is there such a long-lasting potion?
I can tell you clearly that the injection treatment we perform in the pain clinic has only two components in the potion: a low concentration of local anesthetic and a trace amount of glucocorticoid. Pharmacologically speaking, the duration of action of these two drugs does not exceed 72 hours at most, so why is it that “one injection lasts for three months”?
Modern pain theory tells us that inflammation is the basis of all pain, and the elimination of inflammation can effectively stop pain, or even cure pain. In our injection, the low concentration of local anesthetic agent plays the role of reducing nerve excitability and improving local microcirculation, which is the fast-acting component of pain treatment; the trace amount of glucocorticoid plays the role of eliminating inflammation (the inflammation here is a sterile inflammation, which is a defense reaction of the body, not the “inflammation” caused by microbial infection). It is a long-acting component of pain management. The combination of the two, the “miraculous” effect experienced by many patients: a shot immediately no pain, and the pain disappeared!
The old Zhang listened to a sudden realization, previously thought that the pain physician injection is “closed” (this topic can be found in the previous issues of this public number), relying on the drug’s effectiveness to stop the pain, in fact, the original like pneumonia with antibiotics, the inflammation eliminated, the disease will be cured, so the back of the injection will not be pain.