Questioning. Understand. Act.
However, you may also have sudden back pain with increasing intensity on exertion and radiating into one leg. The suspicion expressed by your doctor of a Slipped disc can apparently be confirmed by magnetic resonance imaging. The images show the typical changes.
But be careful! Hasty conclusions can lead to ineffective therapies and unnecessary operations! Diagnostic blockades can be used to find out whether there is actually another cause of the symptoms.
The principle is comparable to a local anaesthetic at the dentist: The dentist interrupts the transmission of pain by blocking the nerve. Because the dental nerve is an obvious source of pain, there is no pain for the duration of the local anaesthetic.
Diagnostic blockades of the spine work according to the same principle. Based on the initial consultation, the physical examination and the results of the imaging, possible pain-triggering structures such as nerves, tendon insertions or vertebral joints are identified and individually anaesthetised under X-ray control. If this leads to the expected reduction in pain, a pain generator is identified. If a blockade does not lead to the hoped-for pain relief, another structure is obviously the cause of the pain.
Two to three injections are usually necessary to find the actual source of the pain. The aim is always to create an individualised pain map that shows exactly where action is needed. This forms the basis of a treatment plan that is individually tailored to each patient.
Chronic pain: a challenge for diagnostics
As the disease progresses, not only does the level of suffering increase, but also the complexity of the disease and thus inevitably that of the Diagnostics. Pain that persists for longer than 3 to 6 months and always has an inherent tendency to take on a life of its own becomes chronic - the pain is transformed from a symptom into a disease in its own right.
If initially there was "only" an anatomical defect in the spine, chronification means a vicious circle of pain, pain-intensifying relieving posture and psychological impairment due to the increased stress level caused by the disease.
Identifying the individual causes of pain is becoming increasingly difficult. This makes it all the more important to have precise diagnostics that have moved beyond the concept of a single cause of pain and take into account the multitude of different factors in the sense of an individual pain map. With regard to back pain, our basis for this is the Munich back pain model.
English 
German 
Russian