The Journal of the Swedish Medical Association

Visualized guidance in the art of injection

Roger Stadra. Injection art - more than technique and anatomy.
CD-ROM film for Windows Media Player.

Reviewer: Ingemar Söderlund, specialist internal medicine, Swedish corporation for orthopedic medicine, Helsingborg, Sweden.

II The task of the physician is to alleviate symptoms of illness when a cure is not possible. Painful conditions where the pain emanates from musculo-skeletal organs are examples of disorders that may chronify. These painful conditions become a torture for the patients and a trouble for the physician. A purpose of treatment is to reduce the pain down to levels that the patient can handle, and the therapist can treat. Musculo-skeletal pain always has a multi-factorial background. In all pain patients there are anatomical structures that have become oversensitive to strain. The difficulty for today's physicians is that knowledge and skills within this field are not taught in the regular medical schools. The physician has to learn diagnostics, local treatment and general treatment on his own, when the pain patients start crowding his or her waiting room.

For diagnostics and pain relief
Locally injected anesthetics, often combined with Cortisone, given to the painful tissue are an excellent method both to confirm diagnosis and simultaneously give relief. The prerequisite for the physician to be able to use this method is knowledge of the musculo-sceletal anatomy and physiology. With this plus a guided training the physician can quickly acquire both knowledge and skill in treating bodily pain conditions.
Since physicians today do not have free possibilities to further educate themselves within this field as a part of the postgraduate education, other possibilities of knowledge becomes all the more important.

A straight path to knowledge
The physician and teacher Roger Stadra has succeeded to summarize and excellently present the difficult art of treating pain in musculo-skeletal organs with well-aimed injection therapy. With the help of modern visualizing technique (CD-ROM) he is showing the way to diagnosis, treatment and differential diagnosis. "Injection art" is a direct guidance in the difficult art of local injection therapy in order to give the patient pain relief, a diagnosis and hope of reduced pain.
Roger Stadra follows the pedagogic tradition that Daniel C Moore concluded 1953 in his manual for "general practitioners, regional block for those blocks often used in an everyday practice."
Next to taking Stadra's own training the educational CD "Injection art" is the straightest path to knowledge and skills for the physician who wants to develop his or her skill within this field.