Anxiety is a condition that affects more people than you might think. The reason you might not know that someone is battling anxiety has to do with the fact that it varies in severity as well as in the physical and emotional symptoms by which it manifests itself. Depending on the type of person you are and what the sources of your anxiety and stress are, you might be facing more challenging experiences with your anxiety than someone is with theirs.
Just as there are varying degrees of anxiety affecting an array of individuals, there are also different treatment options out there to help people start overcoming anxiety. The treatment options that are offered to you will depend on several factors.
Firstly, it will need to be ascertained if your anxiety is linked to a particular mental health condition. If so, your courses of treatment can be tailored to help you cope with that condition. For instance, someone who has post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, will experience anxiety related to a particularly traumatic event that they once experienced.
If you or a loved one has PTSD, one course of treatment that might be a good fit is a stellate ganglion block or SGB. Administered by injection, this injection for anxiety has shown great promise in relieving the anxiety linked to PTSD.
How Does It Work?
When a person undergoes a traumatic experience, the body exhibits physical responses that are related to the emotional feelings of fear and panic. The “fight or flight” mechanism kicks in and your body prepares to defend itself in any way it can. Whether your instinct is to fight or run, your body experiences a rush of hormones that would theoretically allow you to do either right away.
Unfortunately, once the danger is passed and the traumatic event has long since ended, PTSD sufferers still find themselves in that “fight or flight” mode that they were in at the time. This is most likely due to an overcorrection by the body.
The nervous systems on people with anxiety grow an additional amount of stellate ganglion nerves. These are the nerves within the sympathetic nervous system that triggers the “fight or flight.” With a greater amount of these nerves, a person is automatically more sensitive to situations that call to mind their trauma causing panic even when the situation isn’t warranted.
This is where the SGB shot for anxiety comes in. By using an injection of a local anesthetic, a physician can deactivate these extra nerves almost instantaneously. The procedure is done under the guidance of an X-ray machine so that the anesthetic is placed on the exact right spot.
History and Effectiveness
The effects of the stellate ganglion block injection for anxiety on PTSD sufferers experiencing anxiety has been overwhelmingly positive. This procedure has been around since the early 1900s, but its use for anxiety relief was a fortunate accident. It wasn’t until relatively recently that it has been used as anxiety therapy.
A patient who also suffered from PTSD was being treated for a separate condition when he was treated with an SGB injection and found it helped relive many of his PTSD symptoms. Since then, physicians have been using SGB for anxiety.
Patients report feeling more at peace and free from their anxiety within the first hour after the PTSD breakthrough injection. These effects have been known to last for years, with the longest reported relief from a single procedure being 10 years before another anxiety attack treatment is needed.
If you are interested in stellate ganglion block anxiety treatment, PTSD Group can help. Our doctors have experience in performing the SGB injection anxiety treatment and can evaluate whether or not it is the best treatment for you. Since we have offices in Florida and Arizona, there may be a way to get an SGB injection near you.