Joint Injections Specialist

What are joint injections?

Joint injections are minimally invasive treatments for joint pain of all types. Joints are parts of your body where two bones meet. Each of your joints includes a network of cartilage, ligaments, muscles, tendons, nerves, and blood vessels. 

At Gulf Coast Internists, the team provides joint injections with a goal of reducing the inflammation surrounding your injured knee, hip, ankle, elbow, shoulder, wrist, jaw, or finger joints. By reducing inflammation, it decreases pain in your joint and improves its mobility. 

During your joint injection appointment, you’ll sit or lay still as a member of the team cleans the skin around your joint using an antiseptic solution. Then, they inject a local anesthetic into the joint to numb it and prepare it for the injection. 

The joint injection includes both local anesthesia and a corticosteroid, which helps reduce inflammation by slowing the accumulation of cells in the area. After the injection, the team removes the needle slowly and places pressure over the hole to control bleeding. Finally, they secure a bandage over the injection site. 

If you need joint injections for your hip, shoulders, or temporomandibular joints, the team might use ultrasound imaging to guide the needle into the joint for your injection. 

What can joint injections help treat?

Joint injections treat joint pain from injuries and degenerative conditions like arthritis. Joint injuries commonly happen after you overstretch a joint or if you use it repeatedly with the same motion. 

In many cases, the exact cause of your joint pain isn’t clear. Thankfully, joint injections can treat joint inflammation and pain regardless of the precise injury causing it. 

Before the injections, the team at Gulf Coast Internists assesses the joint and may perform an imaging procedure like an ultrasound for a better view of the tissues and blood flow in the area. 

What should I expect after my joint injections?

You don’t have to reserve any extra time for recovery after joint injections at Gulf Coast Internists. After the 10-20 minute procedure, you can go straight back to work, school, or running errands. 

For a few days, you might notice some soreness surrounding the injection site. This might happen as soon as the effects of the local anesthesia wear off. You can relieve some of this soreness with ice and over-the-counter pain relievers. 

The results of joint injections vary from person to person, so you’ll need to follow-up with the team at Gulf Coast Internists to report your results. If you experience significant pain relief, the team may recommend more injections in the future for long-term relief. 

To find out if joint injections are an appropriate addition to your treatment plan for joint pain, call Gulf Coast Internists or request an appointment online today.