Can you tell me about being diagnosed with facet joint pain and had a medial branch block?

Controversial: If pain is produced by bending backwards, suggestive of dx. Controversial is routine diagnosis and treatment.

MBB/RFA: I'm confused by the question, so let me just speak about lumbar facet joint pain and branch blocks. The joints in the spine that allow us to move are the facet joints. They can become arthritic or just inflamed from trauma. If the pain has been there for a while, medial branch blocks can confirm the pain is from the joints, and then lead to radiofrequency ablation (rfa) for long-term relief.

Facet Joint Pain: Radiofrequency procedures work well if a previous facet injection or medial branch block was performed with greater than 75-80% relief that was obtained. This is used to determine pain from facet joints. As with anything there are failures, but quite low if the block worked well. Risks are the same as with any spine procedure, no different. Rare that you would be worse off afterwards.