This is a good article to read. A lot of good points...however, I don't agree with how it paints interventional pain medicine doctors as "greedy." My

Bloomberg Businessweek

Epidurals Linked to Paralysis Seen With $300 Billion Pain Market

January 04, 2012, 6:34 AM EST
By David Armstrong

Dec. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Valinda Parrish talks to her 60- year-old husband like a doting mother speaks to a child. “I am going to go outside for a little bit,” she tells him. “Use your horn if you need me.”

Rollie Parrish, nearly blind and in a wheelchair, toots the air horn he keeps on his lap if he wants something to eat or has to go to the bathroom. Four years ago, the Vietnam veteran had just spent a weekend deer hunting when he went to a hospital near his home in Nederland, Texas, for a shot of steroids to his neck to ease chronic pain. He suffered a stroke during the procedure, according to a lawsuit that was settled out of court. “He knows what happened to him, and he is angry,” his wife of 29 years said in an interview.

A surge in steroid injections to alleviate back and neck pain in the U.S. is bringing with it an increase in severe and unexpected complications, including paralysis and death. Reports of the side effects have prompted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to review the safety of steroid injections into the epidural space near the spinal cord, in consultation with an advisory group, the agency confirmed. Some 8.9 million Americans received the shots last year.

“We used to say this is so safe,” said James Rathmell, chief of pain medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a member of the advisory group, who alerted the FDA to cases of such shots causing harsh complications. “It is a very rare event, but it is not zero, and it’s devastating.”

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