How To Treat Shingles

Certain Injections

Certain injections might be used to help manage the severe pain often associated with shingles. The condition tends to cause serious pain on and around the site of the redness and blisters. While helping the sores to heal faster is ideal for treating outbreaks and returning to day-to-day function, the pain needs to be managed in the meantime. When managing shingles-related pain, a doctor will usually use an injection that includes a combination of local anesthetics and corticosteroids. In addition, after the sores heal, there's sometimes a lingering pain, which is referred to as post-herpetic neuralgia. According to researchers, somewhere between thirty and sixty percent of the adults with shingles will also develop post-herpetic neuralgia, which leads to nerve pain, often around the wall of the chest. To treat post-herpetic neuralgia, a doctor might use intercostal nerve blocks to inject local anesthetic between two of the patient's ribs. They might also use thoracic epidural injections, which are anti-inflammatory drugs injected around the spinal cord to reduce pain by decreasing inflammation in the nerve roots.