3 Rady Children’s Hospital, UCSD, San Diego, CA Tuberculosis affects one third of the world’s population. While the disease may be adequately treated by chemotherapy, surgery plays an important role in the management of complications of the disease process. Tuberculosis is rare in the Western world, often leading to a delay in diagnosis and treatment. Our goal is to review the diagnosis and man...

The work of a chronic back pain service in secondary care in the West Midlands is reported. The service offers acupuncture, spinal injection procedures, osteopathy and a range of other interventions for patients whose back pain has not responded to conservative management. This section of the report focuses on injection procedures for lumbar facet joint and sacroiliac joint pain, which have bee...

STUDY DESIGN Retrospective study. PURPOSE Facet joint block is performed for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes and generally carried out under computerd tomography (CT) or radiologic fluoroscopy guidance. Ultrasonography-guided facet block has recently been attempted. So, we compared the results of ultrasonography-guided facet joint block with the results of fluoroscopy-guided facet joint bl...

OBJECTIVE Individuals experiencing low back pain often present clinically with intervertebral joint dysfunction. The purpose of this study was to determine whether relative changes in stiffness at a single spinal joint alters neural responsiveness of lumbar muscle spindles to either vertebral movement or position. METHODS Muscle spindle discharge was recorded in response to 1mm L6 ramp and ho...

We describe a lumbar facet syndrome in which disabling symptoms are associated with normal or nearnormal plain radiographs. Local spinal fusion relieved symptoms in 12 patients; the excised facet joint surfaces showed some of the histological changes seen in chondromalacia patellae and in osteoarthritis of other large joints. The most frequent change was focal full-thickness cartilage necrosis ...

Recordings were obtained from slowly adapting mechanoreceptors innervating the posterior aspect of the cat knee joint capsule. It was observed that, with rising intra-articular volume, initially both intra-articular pressure and the neural discharge increased. This increase was dependent on the rate of fluid accumulation within the joint. However, the joint nerve discharge invariably levelled o...