Wrist Joint Injections

Your wrist is a delicate yet vital joint, the smallest of your body. As a consequence, it’s easy to injure your wrist in a fall or from overuse. Soccer may be the only sport for which you don’t need your wrist; all other sports potentially put your wrists in harm’s way. When illness or an injury occurs, however, you can get pain relief from a cortisone wrist injection.

Formulated from a common adrenal gland hormone, the corticosteroid medicine in an injection in the wrist eases your pain and fights the inflammation causing the pain. Steroids are anti-inflammatory medicine, although the pain-killing effect takes several days after a cortisone wrist injection to start working. This treatment is effective for a number of wrist maladies, including:

Carpal tunnel syndrome
Pain from a ganglion cyst
Osteoarthritis in your wrist
De Quervain’s disease
Wrist tendonitis
First carpometacarpal joint pain
Trigger finger
Certain wrist injuries, like a sprain or strain
Most hand injuries

The Procedure for a Cortisone Wrist Injection

Usually, our physician recommends more conservative treatments — everything from pain medications to physical therapy — before turning to a cortisone wrist injection. Sometimes, those treatments are enough to ease the pain and heal the problem. But when an injection is the best alternative, you’re in good hands at our clinic.

The procedure for a wrist cortisone injection follows a straightforward approach. The entire process is done in the doctor’s office, so you’re made as comfortable as possible. Then:

Your sports and pain medicine doctor in Manhattan determines exactly where your pain originates and where to place the injection in the wrist.
Your wrist is cleaned, disinfected.
Your wrist is set on a comfortable level for your doctor and for you, with the injection spot on the top. For complex cortisone wrist injections, your wrist and hand are placed on an x-ray table so your physician can use real-time fluoroscopic imagery to guide the needle where it needs to go.
Once you’re comfortable, the doctor uses a topical anesthetic to numb the area before the injection.
Your sports and pain doctor makes the injection, placing the steroid medication at the right spot to encourage pain relief and healing.

After Your Injection in the Wrist

The local anesthetic in the injection provides instant pain relief, but it wears off in several hours. Your pain may return then because the steroids don’t start working until two or three days after the injection. In the meantime, over-the-counter pain relievers are usually effective at controlling your pain.

Don’t exert yourself in the days following your wrist cortisone injection. Take note of anything unusual about how you feel. If you develop fever-like symptoms or notice an increase in pain and swelling — more than it was before the injection — contact your doctor. While you’re waiting for the steroid medicine to take effect:

Keep the skin clean where the doctor injected you
Have someone else do the dishes — don’t submerge your hand in water, although it’s OK to shower
Limit your exercise; no weight-lifting
Apply ice wrapped in a towel to your wrist, especially if it’s still swollen

Cortisone Injection in Wrist Side Effects

Unexpected side effects are very rare, as long as you’re not allergic to the injected steroid medication. If you notice any of the injections side effects, contact our sports pain management clinic. Most are rare and many aren’t serious, but let your knowledgeable doctor decide. These risks and side effects, which are most often temporary, include:

An infection in your wrist
Whitening skin where you were injected
Thinning bones, especially if you’ve had multiple injections
Temporarily increased blood sugar, mostly for diabetics
Damage to your wrist nerves
A return of the pain and inflammation in your wrist, at least until the cortisone kicks in

If you’re given too much cortisone in your joints, it can eat away at the cartilage there, which can emphasize any arthritis you already have. Therefore, your doctor limits your exposure. You can’t get a cortisone wrist injection more frequently than every six weeks, and your physician should limit the number of injections you get to fewer than four per year which includes all steroid injections, including the cervical epidural and lumbar epidural steroid injections.

Febin Melepura, MD is a top rated, best in class interventional pain management doctor. He is a nationally recognized pain relief specialist and is among the top pain care doctors in New York City and the country. He is an award winning expert and contributor to a prominent media outlets.

Dr. Febin Melepura has been recognized for his thoughtful, thorough, modern approach to treating chronic pain and, among other accolades, has been named a “top pain management doctor in New York”, and one of “America’s Top Doctors™” for an advanced sports injury treatments.