Thermal Imaging Provides a Closer Look at Stellate Blocks in Pain Management

Physicians depend on the subjective judgement of the treated individual to evaluate the result of pain management. This can be difficult, as communication between the patient and the physician might be misleading; hence, tools to rate treatment efficacy in a strictly biological sense are required. Individual differences in dealing with pain have been described for years: similar noxious stimuli may evoke completely diverse reactions. Thus, there is a need for tools to rate the physical outcome of procedures applied in pain therapy that are objective, patient-independent, and may be performed easily without causing further harm to the patient's health. This is especially important in stellate blocks, since anatomic landmarks are used to guide the needle; thus accidental blocks in other structures might occur. Some pain syndromes do not evolve from the somatic nervous system, which is normally responsible for delivering information about activation of nociceptor (a nerve ending that selectively responds to painful stimuli, causing the sensation of pain) terminals in the skin or underlying subcutaneous tissue, and are the result of a harmful damage to the organism.