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Minnesota Workers Compensation – Coritsone Injections

On Behalf of | May 7, 2013 | Workers' Compensation |

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You just sustained a Minnesota workers compensation injury to your knee, elbow or shoulder at work and the prescription by your doctor may well be a cortisone shot.  For most, the pain relief is almost immediate!

Unfortunately, recent studies show that short-term gain may make for long-term pain. There’s increasing evidence that cortisone shots, long the treatment of choice for the painful tendon problem known as tennis elbow, knees or shoulder, actually increases the risk of continued problems or relapse one year out.

The latest , published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 83 percent of people who got a cortisone shot for tennis elbow had recovered or improved one year later. Sounds good, right? Well, 96 percent who got placebo shots did just as well. The study included 165 people in Brisbane, Australia.

And about half of the people getting cortisone shots had symptoms return within a year, compared to 12 percent who didn’t get the treatment.

Those results are similar to of tendon damage in elbows, shoulders, and Achilles tendons found steroids less helpful long term than taking a “wait and see” approach. The researchers from the University of Queensland who did this study also wanted to see if physical therapy would counteract the lack of long-term improvement. It didn’t.

“The recommendation from this study is not to combine physiotherapy and corticosteroid injections, or to do corticosteriod injection,” , chair in sports physiotherapy and a co-author of the study, said in an email to Nancy Shute with National Public Radio.

Vicenzino says that advice doesn’t apply to acute tendon injuries, like in the knee. Cortisone shots can help reduce the pain caused by those sorts of acute injuries, though, they are sometimes used to excess by athletes eager to get back on the field.

The pain of tennis elbow (official name, ) seems to be caused by damage to the tendons that attach the forearm muscles to the elbow, but not by inflammation. It’s becoming more common, and can be caused by repetitive gripping of a computer mouse, smartphone, or other gizmo, not just a tennis racket.

It’s not clear why , a steroid, would quickly relieve the pain from that sort of tendon damage. It may be due to cortisone’s effect on chemicals produced by the damaged tendon — or by placebo effect. Doctors have long recommended that patients have no more than three cortisone shots in a body part per year, but there’s no firm data on whether that’s too much, or not enough.

“The harder you drill into the data, the more it seems we may be better off doing nothing,” says , an upper-extremity surgeon at the Illinois Bone and Joint Institute in Glenview, Ill. “If you do nothing at all for this condition, it will eventually go away.”

But eventually can mean three years, for tennis elbow. So Benson says he’ll continue to recommend cortisone shots to his patients, along with pain relievers like Advil, and physical therapy. “The interest in treating this is for patients to have better quality of life sooner rather than later.”

That’s a different point of view than that of , chief of physical therapy at Harvard University Health Systems. “If you can get through the short term without [a shot], you may be better off,” she told Shots.

The JAMA study found that physical therapy helped improve symptoms four weeks out, but showed no more benefits than placebo a year after treatment. But the therapy participants took half as much pain medication, and didn’t have the problems with recurrence seen with cortisone shots. Article by Nancy Shute; NPR

At Atkinson Law Office, P.A. and Minnesota Disability, we live, eat, and breath Minnesota workers’ compensation.  Every year we recover millions of dollars in benefits for injured workers; including medical, wage loss, retraining assistance and monetary benefits for permanent injuries.  Though attorney Thomas Atkinson will litigate your matter on your behalf, we have a team approach in assuring we stay on top of your case day in and day out.

Nearly every one of our staff members has personal experience in the struggles of workers compensation injuries or has worked for work comp insurance companies before coming to work for our office.  They know the secret tips to obtaining benefits for you. 

Contact Atkinson Law Office and Minnesota Disability today at 651-333-3636 and visit our website for more information.  You can also submit your questions online by following this link.  Remember your consultation is FREE and there is never a fee until we recover benefits for you.

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