My doctor wants me to have a discography before doing surgery to remove the disc at L45. I've heard these tests are painful and aren't always accurate. Is this true?
The nature of the discography test is to find the disc that's causing your painful symptoms. A long, thin needle is inserted into the disc and a contrast dye is injected into the disc.
A local, numbing agent or anesthetic is used before inserting the needle through the back so that part isn't painful. It's when the pressure of the liquid dye increases enough in the disc causing pain receptors to respond that you may feel disc pain. The surgeon carefully monitors your response and stops the test as soon as it's positive.
If there's nothing wrong with the disc, then the test should be negative and you won't feel a thing. Whether the test is positive or not, after the test, you may feel some mild to moderate muscle discomfort. Usually the doctor will give you some medications to help ease any painful symptoms over the next few days.
Although 75 percent of the results are accurate, this still leaves a one in four chance that you can have a false-positive response. This means that you test positive for a disc problem when the disc is perfectly fine. So far we don't have any way to predict who might fall into this group.
The test does offer good information to help in the decision-making process. A negative test means surgery isn't needed. A true-positive test is a green light to proceed with surgery.
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