WakeMed Imaging professionals also specialize in providing injections and procedures to diagnose and relieve pain in all areas of the spine (lumbar, thoracic and cervical), as well as joints (shoulder, hip, wrist, etc.).
Patients who need MRIs, CT scans or ultrasound in conjunction with their joint injections can conveniently have both procedures in a single location.
Our radiologists also have advanced training in specific areas, including neurological and musculoskeletal imaging. This special focus, combined with our image-guided approach, ensures the safety and accuracy of all diagnostic and therapeutic injections.
How Diagnostic Injections Work
Diagnostic injections are intended to help your provider determine the cause of your pain. They assist in determining the pain generator(s) by process of elimination.
The process of finding the pain generator begins with a careful history and physical examination. This may lead to a differential diagnosis, which is a list of all the possibilities that best fit the findings from the initial history and physical examination. Once the differential diagnosis list has been determined, the goal is to figure out which ones are causing your symptoms.
What to Expect: MRIs, CT Scans and Ultrasound Testing
The next step will be to obtain MRIs, CT scans or ultrasound, if necessary. Each of these radiological tests gives your provider information about the structure of your spine, bones and joints since the images may highlight abnormalities potentially responsible for your pain.
If a structural abnormality identified on the radiological tests is causing your pain, and if your provider can inject that structure to temporarily numb it and only that specific structure and the pain stops temporarily, then it makes sense that this is what is causing your pain.
It is also likely that you may have several abnormalities visible on the radiological tests and there is also a possibility that the pain felt in one part of the body is generating from an entirely different part of the body. As such, it may be unclear which abnormality is the cause of your symptoms without diagnostic injections.
The Benefits of Diagnostic Injections
Diagnostic injections carefully narrow down and determine which abnormality is causing the pain, thereby opening the door to the most effective, long-term treatment options.