Medial Branch Blocks

Medial branch nerves are the very small nerves that allow one to feel pain from the facet joints. These nerves do not control any muscles or sensation in your arms or legs. They are located along a bony groove in your low back, neck and over a bone in your mid-back.

If during your treatment simple joint injections and/or other treatments have not provided you with adequate pain relief and we diagnose that your facet joints are the source of your pain. Therefore, you may benefit from having the small medial branch nerves and their pain signals interrupted via a controlled non-surgical heat lesion produced by a special needle. Before interrupting these nerves and their pain signals, your physician will first block the medial branch nerve signals with numbing medicine as a test. This tells your physician whether or not you are likely to benefit from having the medial branch nerves interrupted at a later date by the special radio-frequency (RF) needle. This more permanent treatment is called RF medial branch.