[Rein]

Oh, yeah; just for the heck of it, here's the response I posted (or tried to post) to that newbie's first topic. You can see it was someone new by my first word!

Welcome! A discogram is designed to determine if a particular disc is the cause of the pain a patient reports (narrowing down the pain to a specific disc rather than a general area of the back). A needle is inserted into the suspect disc and fluid is injected. If the correct disc is injected then patients respond with immediate pain exactly duplicating what they previously reported (and some do not). The result of the fluid injection is, many times, a re-inflation of the disc, which then results in the newly-injected fluid acting in a similar manner to the original core of the disc (nucleus pulposa). The original core acted as a shock absorber as well as preventing direct compression of the outer shell (annulus-which contains nerves which produce most of the pain in the back post-discectomy) between the endplates of the vertebrae. You are most likely experiencing a temporary loss of pain only because the annulus is re-inflated. Once the injected fluid leaks out again (and it will!) the annulus will flatten, the endplates of the adjacent vertebrae will continue to compress the annulus and you'll be back to the same pain (only you'll perceive it as greater because you've had a respite for a while) as before. Don't let this temporary respite fool you; you're *not* cured (sorry!) and you need to continue pursuing your original goal of ADR, fusion or whatever.