i had 2 of them. i got xray guided epidorals. i say try it. i think it defianlty helped but i wouldnt work out at all period after u get it for a month or 2. I think juice might have helped me also.

I had 3 of them 10 years ago. They were great. But i put on a ton of water weight from them. Be very carfull what you eat after them for the next few days. You will bloat.

Mine didn't work so great, but they use for back pain caused by some type of back injury, not muscle cramps. I'd go with some deep tissue messages and/or chiropractics, before letting them inject me. Doctors do use epidural injects for diagnostic reasons too. What I mean by that is if you get some type of relief, even if it's a couple of hours. Then they'll do something more drastic to see if that helps.

I had 2 epidural injections and 2 bi-lateral facet injections, which were used for diagnostic purposes.

From the results of those procedures, they did a risotomy on my. Don't know if I spelled it right, but what they do is put needles into your nerves, then heat the nerve up to twice your body temperature, it's supposed to deaden the nerves, so you don't feel the pain. It took my over 3 months to recover from that procedure alone, and I still have pain for time to time, I'm just starting to feel better. That has kept me out of the gym for almost one year, with all those injections and procedures.

It does work for some, but it's not a slam dunk.

JohnnyB

I think it is worth a try, especially if you've had problems long term.

However, there is a small risk of a pretty brutal complication, and it happened to me.

When the doc inserts the needle, he will use a "loss of resistance" technique to determine when he has penetrated the cartilage and the tip of the needle is in the epidural gap, where the catabolic steroid is supposed to go. Well, in my case (and overall about 1% of the time), the doc felt no loss of resistance. As a result, the needle punctured the dura. The dura is the membrane that keeps cerebral-spinal fluid (CSF) where it should be - bathing the spinal cord and brain. When that CSF fluid leaks out, you get a pretty bad headache, especially when you stand up.

To make matters worse, the punctured area doesn't have a good blood supply to get platelets into the hole to plug it up, AND the catabolic steroid tends to break down what does get to the hole.

The eventual solution in my case was a "blood patch". They drew blood out of a vein in my arm and injected it into the epidural gap. It took 2 blood patches and about 3 months for me to finally recover from all of this.

mine was xray guided. dont know if that means anything. i had 2