Oh, My Aching Joints! What Can I Do?
Aching joints can make it challenging to do almost everything, from walking to carrying grocery bags to opening a jar of pickles. Find out what you can do to relieve your pain to get back to your usual routine.
Learn How Botox® Works to Alleviate Pain
You may know Botox® best as the injection that reduces the appearance of wrinkles, but Botox has many medical uses, including alleviating pain.
At Orthopedic & Wellness in Waldorf, Frederick, and Germantown, Maryland, our skilled physicians, Dr. Ojedapo Ojeyemi and Dr. Matthew Roh, specialize in pain management, offering many solutions to ease discomfort, including Botox injections for various pain conditions.
This month’s blog aims to help you learn how Botox works to alleviate pain and whether you might benefit from the treatment.
About Botox
Botox is a medication that contains a toxin made by Clostridium botulinum, a bacterium that causes a life-threatening illness called botulism that affects the body’s nervous system when consumed in excessive amounts, usually from food.
Despite its origin, doctors administer small doses of Botox to treat various health conditions, including excessive sweating, overactive bladder, and eyelid twitching. Medical professionals also use it to treat pain conditions like migraines and muscle spasms and experimentally to alleviate chronic lower back pain.
How Botox alleviates pain
Botox is a neurotoxin that temporarily disrupts nerve signals to get the desired effect. For pain, Botox works by temporarily blocking nerve signals to reduce the delivery of pain sensations to the brain or to limit muscle activity that contributes to pain.
Sciatica and migraines are pain conditions driven by nerve signals to the brain. Botox injections may ease pain by interrupting the messages from the nerves to the brain, reducing the severity and frequency of the painful sensations.
Jaw pain, back pain, and neck pain may occur from many causes, including tense muscle. Botox can help diminish this type of pain by reducing the nerve signals that control muscle activity, allowing the muscles to relax so you don’t feel as much pain.
Can Botox help you?
Botox injections are one of many pain treatments we offer at Orthopedic & Wellness. Currently, it’s FDA-approved to treat only a few pain-related conditions, including chronic migraines, upper limb spasticity (prolonged muscle contraction), and cervical dystonia (involuntary contractions of the neck muscles).
Using Botox to treat any other type of pain is off-label, so your health insurance may not cover it. We can talk to you about Botox and your pain condition and help you decide if it’s a treatment you want to try.
Results vary, and you may not get pain relief right away. Also, the effects may wear off within 3-4 months. However, for some pain conditions like migraines, pain relief may continue even after stopping Botox treatment.
Because we inject only a small amount, we use tiny needles so the injections cause little discomfort. But we may need to make multiple injections in order to adequately target the source of your pain so get the relief you need.
There’s no downtime or restrictions following Botox, and you can go back to your usual routine the same day.
Are you struggling to gain control over your pain? Let us help you get the relief you need. Whether it’s Botox or one of our other pain management treatments, we can create a plan that works for you. Call the office closest to you today or book an appointment online.
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