Donna D’Alessio, MD
Montville Pain & Veins · Serving Pompton Lakes, NJ
Back Pain Care for Pompton Lakes, NJ
When the pain comes from a joint in the spine — found by examination, confirmed by injection and treated without surgery in Towaco.
No referral needed to book · We check your benefits before anything is scheduled · 624 Main Rd, Suite 2B, Towaco, NJ 07082
About fifteen minutes away
You will find Montville Pain & Veins at 624 Main Road, Suite 2B, Towaco. From Pompton Lakes it is the Paterson-Hamburg Turnpike, the Newark-Pompton Turnpike and Jacksonville Road — roughly a quarter of an hour without traffic. No referral is needed to book; if your plan wants one before it pays, that comes up when we check your benefits ahead of the visit.
When a joint is the source
Two kinds of joint account for a lot of back pain: the small facet joints at the back of the spine, and the sacroiliac joints where the spine meets the pelvis. Each has a recognisable way of behaving:
- A facet joint tends to hurt more when you stand for a while, lean backwards or turn, and to ease when you bend forward.
- A sacroiliac joint hurts low down and to one side — often enough that it gets blamed on the hip — and frequently complains most as you climb out of a car.
Imaging often cannot tell these apart from other sources, because several structures in the low back send pain into the same area. What links a joint to your pain is the examination — how the spine moves, where it is tender, what the nerves and hip muscles are doing — and, often, how the joint answers an injection.
An injection that answers a question
A joint injection places a corticosteroid, usually with a local anaesthetic, into the joint suspected of causing the pain. It does two jobs:
- It tests. If numbing that joint switches the pain off for a few hours, that joint was producing it — something no scan can show.
- It treats. The steroid settles the inflammation; its effect builds over several days and peaks after a week or two.
Spinal facet joints are not reliably reached by feel alone, so imaging guidance is used where the anatomy calls for it, and you are told which approach your injection needs. The appointment takes about fifteen minutes and you drive yourself home. Spare the joint strenuous loading for a day or two; some backs ache for 48 hours before the benefit appears, and ice and rest see to that.
Why it is never the whole plan
Steroid injections into one joint give back less each time, so they are spaced out, usually by at least three months. The easier weeks they buy are for the work that lasts: a rehabilitation plan aimed at how you sit, lift and move. Settle a joint without changing whatever overloaded it, and the relief is borrowed rather than kept.
Pompton Lakes patients ask
Who will examine me? Dr. Donna D’Alessio, board certified in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and formerly Chief Resident in PM&R at Mount Sinai Hospital. The practice does not operate; if a surgeon is what you need, she tells you so and says who to see.
Can I have injections whenever it flares? Not indefinitely. A joint that needs steroid again and again is a joint that needs a different plan, and you will be told when that point has come.
Is back pain ever an emergency? Rarely, but yes. New weakness in a leg, numbness in the groin or inner thighs, loss of bladder or bowel control, back pain with a fever, or severe pain after a serious fall or accident all mean an emergency department, not an appointment.
More about back pain and joint injections, or back pain care for neighbouring Riverdale and Pequannock Township.
Tell us what’s going on
A consultation is a conversation and an examination, not a sales appointment. Dr. D’Alessio will tell you what she thinks is causing it, what can be done about it, and — when that is the honest answer — that you do not need a procedure.