Back Pain Treatment Home » Diagnosis and Cost
The cause of your back pain may not be easy to determine. Abnormalities on imaging, including MRI, can not identify the cause of the pain. For example, you may have an MRI which shows a bulging disc disease or lumbar arthritis, but that may not be the actual cause of your back pain. In other words, we need to find what is really, actually causing your pain and not just what looks abnormal on an x-ray. Similarly, just because you have a stomach ache and you have an appendix doesn’t mean that your stomach pain is due to appendicitis.
In order to find out what is causing your back pain, we need to do a full and thorough evaluation, including a history of your pain and physical examination and review your imaging such as X-rays and MRI.
We can use an existing back MRI provided that it is less than one year old and was done after the onset of your symptoms. If you do not have a recent back MRI, you will need to get a new one, which can be done at any MRI facility. However, we recommend MetroWest MRI since it is close, usually fast, and offers special out of pocket MRI rate for our patients.
We may also need to do a diagnostic local anesthetic injection into your facet joint or joints to help diagnose the cause of your pain. Facet joint pain is a common cause of back pain that is difficulty to diagnose by physical exam, but easy to diagnose by local anesthetic injection. If the local anesthetic injected into your facet joint significantly reduces your back pain, then we have found the cause of your pain and we can treat it these with a regenerative medicine or stem cell procedure. Diagnostic Facet joint injections are a simple and low risk procedure.
Your initial visit and some of our procedures are covered by insurance. We accept most major insurances (but not Medicaid or any Medicaid Programs.) If we do not accept your insurance, you will need to pay out of pocket at the time on your visit.
The following is a list of visits and procedures that are usually covered by insurance:
Some of our procedures are not covered by insurance:
If you need a new MRI, we can write you a prescription for it if you are one of our patients. Your insurance may cover the cost of your MRI.
In many cases, insurance companies require pre approval for an MRI which can be a lengthy and difficult process. If your insurance doesn’t cover the cost, we have a special out of pocket MRI rate for our patients at Metrowest MRI.
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