Are you sick and tired of not being able to manage your chronic back pain? Could it be that you haven’t gotten to the root of it and are just putting “bandaids” on it? Sprains to the ligaments, ruptured disks, strained muscles, and irritation to the joints are some of the primary causes of back pain. Research has shown that spinal manipulation by a chiropractor can result in better outcomes for lessening lower back pain, especially when suffering from these ailments.
Chiropractic hasn’t always been used for chronic back pain
Before chiropractors were widely used, doctors mostly just threw pain medication at these conditions giving rise to the opioid epidemic in the U.S. Consider this: half of all working Americans experience back pain symptoms each year. For some, it is debilitating enough to cause them not to go to work and result in lost wages and even job loss. That is the scope of people who may or may not have received a prescription for opioid drugs in America each year.
Now that reputable health groups like the American Chiropractic Association have identified the correlation between opioid addiction and back pain they are recommending other approaches to care including heat therapy, acupuncture, spinal manipulation, and massage, as the primary care options.
If there’s no improvement, then one can receive a prescription for drugs like Ibruprofen and in some cases muscle relaxants, which are less addictive.
You must work with your doctors to rid your chronic back pain
So many think that just getting a prescription or going to a doctor once will get rid of the pain. That’s not the case! Back pain requires you and a third party to work together in order to truly get rid of the pain. There are several modalities that can work together to help you. For example, you can use an acupuncturist, a chiropractor, a physical therapist, and even a certified massage therapist. Depending on what’s going on with your body, you may choose to use one, two, or even all of these. Regardless of who or how many practitioners you use, you have to be willing to do some work yourself.
There are some things you can do on your own to lessen the pain and speed up your healing. For example, finding and using different muscle groups in your back apart from the usual injured muscles. It’s possible to do this by learning how to shift your posture so that a different muscle group comes into play, allowing the injured set to rest and recover. The beauty about seeing an integrative practitioner, like myself, is that I will teach you how to do these things specifically for your body and your injury, and to speed up your healing.
Some doctors don’t tell you that when you continually use injured muscles, your pain threshold lessens, and soon even the slightest movement of those muscles results in pain. So continued provocation of the muscles results in further lowering the pain threshold to the point that even a slight tweak results in excruciating pain. Therefore, learning how to use different muscle groups is even more important.
Picking the scab
When you don’t know how to use them and you keep irritating them, the concept is known as “picking at the scab”. When you learn to stop picking at the scab, you give the muscles a chance to heal and regenerate. During this restorative time, you experience less and less pain until it is no more. All you have to do is learn to use positive movements and good posture to avoid triggering the injured muscles.
The primary cause of back pain never residing
Flawed movements are the primary reasons why back pain never recovers or reoccurs after complete recovery. The human body is a self-healing organism, so when the pain sensors are triggered, the back naturally tries to find ways to mend the problem. Unfortunately, we keep continuing with daily harmful patterns that cause re-injury and nullify the self-healing that has taken place.
Even doctors believe that bypassing the body’s self-healing ability to use external components like drugs can ignore the very thing that the body needs to recover. With the right understanding of natural pain management in the body, you can help your lower back improve, heal, and stay pain-free.
For more information on how to heal your lower back naturally and keep it healthy, schedule an appointment for a customized approach to your care.