The injection worked. A 60-year-old man walked into a hospital in Ankara with chronic low back pain he rated between 8 and 10 out of 10, and left with a pain score of zero. Ten hours later, the hiccups started, and they did not stop for roughly 60 hours.
Anesthesiologists from the Department of Algology at Bilkent City Hospital described the case in Agri, a peer-reviewed Turkish pain medicine journal, in April. Their point was not that epidural steroid injections are dangerous. It was that a strange, poorly documented complication exists, and patients are rarely told about it.
