Back Pain Care for Riverdale, NJ

Six weeks is long enough

Route 23 and Interstate 287 both run through Riverdale, the interstate with two exits inside the borough. If your day includes a long stretch in a car seat, and the ache in your lower back has outlasted six weeks, a proper examination is overdue. You will find us about seven miles away by the Newark-Pompton Turnpike and Jacksonville Road, at 624 Main Road, Suite 2B in Towaco.

Read your back through the day

When it hurts says a great deal about what hurts. Notice these before the appointment and bring them with you:

• On waking — stiffness that is worst first thing and loosens as you get moving.
• After sitting at a desk or behind the wheel, worse again when you bend or cough, sometimes running into a leg: a pattern that points toward a disc.
• Standing in one place, worse leaning back and better leaning forward: typical of the facet joints.
• Climbing out of the car, low on one side and felt near the hip: the sacroiliac joint is a common culprit.
• Partway through a walk, legs growing heavy until you sit down or rest your weight on a cart: this suggests narrowing of the spinal canal.
• Pressing on a tight strip of muscle next to the spine that refers pain to another spot: a trigger point.

A physician whose specialty is function

Dr. Donna D’Alessio is board certified in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and was Chief Resident in PM&R at Mount Sinai Hospital. The specialty’s whole aim is to get a body doing what it has stopped doing, without making an operation the opening move. Her examination covers how your spine moves, where it is tender, how the nerves respond and how your hips are compensating, and the plan follows from what she finds.

What treatment can include

• Trigger point injections to break a muscle spasm — a few minutes per site, with no downtime.
• Joint injections into a facet or sacroiliac joint, which calm it and confirm it as the source.
• PRP for tissue that needs help to heal. It is generally not covered by insurance, so the price comes first.
• A rehabilitation plan for the mechanics behind the pain, so that relief outlasts the injection.

Riverdale patients ask

Can one injection fix it? That promise is not made here. Chronic back pain is rarely solved by a single shot, and no treatment plan is offered until there is a working explanation of the cause.

Will my plan help with the cost? Plans usually count a pain consultation as medical care, and the same goes for joint and trigger point injections when they are medically necessary. Many plans for public employees, school districts and union members also carry out-of-network benefits that go unused. We check yours before anything is booked.

When does back pain need emergency care? When it comes with new weakness in a leg, numbness in the groin, a change in bladder or bowel control, a fever, or follows a bad fall. Those need an emergency department, not an appointment.

More about back pain, or back pain care for neighbouring Butler.