Dr. Joshua John-Ram Schacter explains how steroid injections diagnose and temporarily relieve joint pain, but warns they can damage tissue long-term. He contrasts them with PRP and stem cell injections, which he says are safer and sometimes cure inflammation.
Steroid injections or types of injections can be used to diagnose problems. Now, for instance, we very commonly use numbing medication in combination with a steroid injected into a joint or tissue, particularly the rotator cuff or small areas around the shoulder, sometimes in the knee or ankle, to diagnose a problem. For instance, if you think it's a tendon issue, you can inject some numbing medication into that area. And if it makes your pain go away, then that can prove to your physician where that pain is coming from. Now, if you add a steroid in there, it can damage the tissue, but it can also give you a little bit longer relief than just numbing medicine by itself, which only lasts for a couple of hours. So here is the problem. We're using a medication that can be damaging to your tissue to diagnose a problem, but also to treat it in the short term. But it can cause longer term issues. And that's why PRP or bone marrow aspirate injections or stem cell treatments can be very useful because they're much more healthy to those tissues that we inject them into, and in most cases make those tissues healthier and in some cases can even be curative to the inflammation around a tendon or a joint.
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