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24th Annual Meeting February 13-18, 2008 Orlando, FL
Annual Meeting Highlights
Supported by an educational grant from Merck & Co., Inc.



© 2006 American Academy of Pain Medicine
Thursday, February 14, 2008: 2:00 PM-3:15 PM
(201) Epidural Steroids: Pro Versus Con
Recently, the American Pain Society’s Low Back Pain Guidelines and the American Academy of Neurology’s Committee on Therapeutics have reviewed the available evidence for performing epidural injections for lumbarradicular pain and have either been essentially neutral or advocated for the abandonment of these procedures. Epidural steroid injections have been utilized for over 60 years, and clinicians are often divided as to the importance of these procedures based on their specialty of origin or other potential biases. These guidelines influence clinical practice and contradict recent publications such as the SPORT trial (Weinstein et al., 2006) that suggested surgery has no statistical superiority over conservative care (which included epidural injections in approximately half of the conservative group). More recently, it has been suggested that unreported conservative care and surgery had similar disability outcomes at 1 year, although the surgical group patients recovered faster. Clinicians have become unclear as to what role surgery, epidurals, and other conservative treatments should play in the clinical care of patients with radicular pain. This pro versus con debate will discuss these and other issues to facilitate greater understanding within the AAPM membership and course participants.
2:00 PM Introduction
Marc Huntoon, MD
2:05 PM Pro: Epidural Steroids Are a useful Adjunct to the Conservative Care of Patients with Radicular Pain
James Rathmell, MD
2:35 PM Con: Epidural Steroids Are not useful in the Conservative Management of Patients with Radicular Pain
Miroslav Misha Backonja, MD
3:05 PM Question & Answer

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