Leg Pain

Leg pain has many potential causes, from acute injuries like ligament sprains and fractures to chronic joint pain resulting from arthritis. You can also develop leg pain if you have circulatory problems such as chronic venous insufficiency or deep vein thrombosis (DVT).

One of the common causes of leg pain that Service First Health frequently see is lower back conditions like herniated or bulging discs, spinal stenosis, bone spurs, and degenerative disc disease, which can lead to pressure or pinching of the spinal nerves. A typical example of this is sciatica, which occurs when the sciatic nerve in your lower back gets pinched.

The sciatic nerve branches into two, with one branch going down each leg to your foot. Sciatica pain can not only spread into the leg, but it is often worse than the pain in your back.

Treating leg pain successfully depends on isolating the cause. For example, a DVT would require an entirely different treatment than a ligament sprain. Therefore it's important to get an accurate diagnosis, which might require diagnostic imaging tests as well as a physical examination.

If your leg pain is musculoskeletal, then physical therapy, medication, orthotics (medical shoe inserts), and/or a brace might be sufficient to relieve your pain. 

Should these approaches prove unsuccessful, Expert Pain offers a range of interventions to relieve even the most persistent leg pain.

Some of the advanced interventions for leg pain include:

• Nerve blocks: Nerve blocks are injections of local anesthetic, often with an anti-inflammatory steroid, directly into a nerve cluster that's sending out pain signals.
• Lumbar epidural steroid injections: Lumbar epidural steroid injections contain a corticosteroid, often with a local anesthetic, that your provider injects into the epidural space surrounding the spinal cord in your lower back.