So my Dr wants me to try a nerve block in my lower back. Long story short, i have had some sort of back pain for the last 15 years, but my last get off in 06 did a number on my lower right side. MRI shows arthritis and a cockeyed vertebra. Have any of you done the nerve block? Gimme the pros/cons
I don't think it's the same, but I had 3 epidurals over a 6 week period and my back felt great for years.
Just did some quick research and that's exactly what I had. I felt great afterwards. This was after the first doctor I saw wanted to immediately fuse my spine.
When i think of nerve block, i think of the thing they do to isolate an entire limb for surgeries to eliminate pain for a while. They highly advised it when i had those 5 surgeries at once on my left arm. Personally, i always decline them. There have been cases of people who receive those nerve blocks never regaining full feeling/mobility, and some have never regain any feeling/mobility. The doctor told me it is very unlikely anything goes wrong, I think he said it was something like 1 out of every 500 experience those negative side effects. But im not willing to take even the slightest chance of losing use of my arm for something as chickenshit as pain management. I would rather just man-up.
Assuming you're talking about a Bier block? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intravenous_regional_anesthesia I had one of those done for surgery on my hand. Wicked cool; they tourniquet your arm, and replace the blood in it with anaesthetic. As they injected it I could feel it enter my arm.. a wave of cold, followed shortly by total numbness, slowly made its way from my hand to my bicep where the tourniquet was. The only danger they said was if the tourniquet leaked and the anaesthetic started to get into the rest of my circulatory system, they'd have to put me under general anaesthesia (which was the alternative to the Bier block anyway). Did you go the GA route then? That, to my understanding, is far riskier than localized anaesthesia. And either way it's not the same as what licketysplit and rd400 are talking about heh
I thought it was some sort of electrical impulse device that stimulated the nerve and kept it from sending pain signals to the brain? Or am I off in some sci-fi weirdness imagining this?
That is something different. When all that shit was going on with my arm I bought one of those units for home. It is called a "Tens Unit". It works because of how the brain prioritizes and process senses/inputs. Electric shock is "higher on the list" than pain. So if you place the pads surrounding the injured area, the electric impulses with mask the pain.