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Dr. Steinmann shares if he uses a local anesthetic to numb a patient's thumb before injected steroids to treat the arthritis.
Dr. Steinmann:
You can do it one or two ways; it depends on the physician. You can do a local injection or just the Novocaine in that area and then when that’s set up then use a slightly bigger needle to go into the joint itself.
One thing we do at the Mayo Clinic is we use ultrasound to find the joint because one of the problems is as it gets arthritic there’s not space there or much of a space and so you don’t want to have the doctor pointing all over the thumb to try and find out where the real joint is with the needle.
So we at the Mayo Clinic use ultrasound to find the joint, then it’s very easy to put the needle in and often we’ll have, it’ll be one shot where you have the pain medicine and the steroid mixed up in one cocktail, so to speak, for the injection.
About Dr. Steinmann, M.D.:
Dr. Scott P. Steinmann, M.D., is on orthopedic surgery at the Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center in Minnesota. Dr. Steinmann received his medical training from Cornell University Medical College in New York, completed his residency in orthopedics at New York Orthopedic Hospital and completed a fellowships focusing on the shoulder and hand surgery from Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and Mayo Graduate School of Medicine respectively.