If you’re taking oral steroids for pain, you might want to check out this study that shows that they might limit the improvement of pain. Among patients experiencing pain, a short course of oral steroids resulted in only modest improvement in function and no significant improvement in pain. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“These findings suggest that a short course of oral steroids (prednisone) is unlikely to provide much benefit for patients with sciatica due to a herniated disk in the lower back,” said lead author Harley Goldberg, DO, a spine care specialist at Kaiser Permanente’s San Jose Medical Center. “Despite its widespread use, we found that oral steroid treatment for acute sciatica is only modestly effective for improving function and is ineffective for reducing pain.”
The researchers found that oral steroids did not reduce the likelihood of undergoing surgery in the year following steroid treatment, and also found no evidence for substantial improvements in other measures of quality of life.
Read the full story here :: Oral steroids for acute sciatica produce limited improvement in function and pain