Alabama Injury Attorneys Blog

Due to a number of complications, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is now reviewing the safety of using steroid injections into the epidural space surrounding the spinal cord. Steroid injections have become one of the most popular ways to treat chronic neck and back pain associated with a car accident or auto accident. With more and more Americans requiring steroid injections for chronic pain, so comes the increased number of problems. Epidurals are typically a routine procedure and take minutes to administer. However, recent findings of severe complications such as paralysis and death have alerted the FDA to step in.

Last year, over 8.9 million Americans received steroid injections. Many of the recipients were victims of car accidents and suffering chronic pain. According to the chairman of the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians, steroid injections, specifically among Medicare patients, have increased 159% over the past ten years.

The pain market is an estimated $300 billion a year industry with epidurals serving as one of the more popular procedures. Epidurals fall under a category called interventional procedures and includes shots of painkillers and spinal cord. Last year Americans spent $23 billion in this category alone-a 231% increase from 10 years ago.

Steroid injections, known as corticosteroids, provide anti-inflammatory relief and are popular to provide knee, shoulder, hip and joint pain. The FDA group investigating the epidural claims are part of the agency's Safe Use Initiative and is intended to reduce "preventable harm". The FDA is investigating injections in which the needle comes within millimeters of the spinal cord, which account for half of the 8.9 million epidurals administered last year.

In 2007, a survey indicated that 78 patients who received shots in the neck for pain suffered serious injury when 13 of those patients resulting in death. Between 2005 and 2008, claims of spinal cord injuries from epidurals caused 31 separate malpractice claims.

Studies are indicating that physicians administer no more than four injections within a six-month time frame. However, pain management guidelines do not indicate an appropriate number of epidurals. One study found a patient who had received 51 epidural injections within a year. Another study found a patient who had suffered a severe spinal cord injury from a car accident and had received 13 epidurals with in a five-month period, and as a result suffered kidney failure.