Dr. Joshua John-Ram Schacter describes the history and clinical role of intraarticular steroid (hydrocodone/hydrocortisone?) injections for joint arthritis and pain, noting the first intraarticular steroid was administered in 1948 and that by 1951 the practice became standard. He argues the basic technology has changed little since then and explains steroids reduce joint pain by dampening the inflammatory cascade.
Medical doctors started administrating hydrocodisone intra articularly. The first one was done in 1948. By 1951, it had become kind of a standard of care in the treatment of joint arthritis and pain. Since that time, that technology has really not changed very much. There's really not a difference in formulation or the types of injections that we do from 1951. And you could imagine that we've had a lot of technological advances in all of their parts of medicine. And so it certainly stands to reason that we can do better than something that was done first in 1948. Intraarticular steroid injections are really valuable in pain control. What a steroid does when we inject it into the joint is it lessens the inflammatory cascade in the joint by interacting with certain chemicals in that cascade. Because the inflammation in the joint is decreased, it causes less pain.
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