How Chiropractic Care Helps Your Lower Back Pain
Chiropractic care helps the body to heal without invasive surgery and medication. As it offers a surgery free treatment for back pain, it’s become an increasingly popular alternative to ease back issues.
The aim is to realign the body, with a focus on the back and spine, to allow the body to heal and thus reduce or eliminate pain.
Most individuals have experience with some kind of lower back pain. In fact, about half of Americans report experiencing episodes of back pain at least once yearly, and it’s a leading cause of missed work and doctor visits. By using chiropractic care, patients can find lasting relief.
Causes of Lower Back Pain
Lower back pain is a common complaint, and it’s no wonder with the plethora of causes behind it. Some of the most common causes of back pain include:
A herniated disc
Also known as a slipped disc, a herniated disc occurs when the soft spinal disk slowly removes itself out of the spinal structure through the exterior. A slipped disc can occur anywhere through the spine, and is usually a result of strain, weakness, or injury.
Sciatica
You might suffer from sciatic nerve pain. This primarily affects the lower back through the hips and legs. This pain is triggered when the sciatic nerve is irritated or damaged either by strain or injury. Issues with the vertebrae near the sciatic nerve can also cause the onset of sciatic pain. The most frequent patients with sciatica tend to be between 30 and 50 years of age.
In some cases, piriformis syndrome may occur when the piriformis muscle becomes stressed, irritated, or inflamed and compresses the sciatic nerve as a result. Piriformis syndrome is where the sciatic nerve is pressed on by the piriformis muscle located at the top part of the hip close to the buttocks.
Strains and sprains
Strains and sprains put stress on muscles and ligaments that results in moderate to severe pain. When these occur in the back, it’s often because of mispositioning during physical activity or excessive stress on the body (such as moving furniture without proper form or a desk job where you sit for long hours daily without good posture and ergonomic practices).
With either of these, patients often experience limited movement and flexibility, as well as swelling and occasional bruising.
Spinal stenosis
Spinal stenosis is a gradual process that results in the spinal cord being compressed due to the narrowing of the spinal column.
If the spinal column narrows significantly, it can cause a variety of nerve issues. When it manifests as back pain, the lower back and buttocks are most frequently affected.
Scoliosis
Most people probably recognize the term ‘scoliosis’ from early childhood and school age physical exams. It’s a curvature in the spine that goes outside of what would be considered normal.
While scoliosis is often detected in these childhood exams, when the condition goes undetected or begins to worsen, it can cause back pain that ranges from aches to severe pain. The unnatural curve can manifest in a more ‘C’ shape or a more ‘S’ shape depending on several factors.
Scoliosis is categorized and diagnosed based on the cause and age of appearance or diagnosis, respectively.
How Arise Family Chiropractic Can Help with Your Lower Back Pain
Seeking a chiropractor for help with your back pain can help with your pain and improve your health. By focusing on manually manipulating the spine and musculoskeletal system, chiropractors help readjust the body into its proper alignment. This in turn promotes healing and relieves pain and strain.
Techniques and treatments used to help lower back pain:
Before we go more in depth with the benefits that chiropractic care offers back pain sufferers, let’s look at the two most frequently used methods that chiropractors use to treat back pain:
Mobilization
Mobilization is used with the intended end result of increasing the patient’s range of motion in their muscles and joints. Muscles and joints are slowly stretched and manipulated to relieve tension and increase flexibility and movement.
Mobilization works in a more gradual manner than other techniques. It’s also a gentler and less intensive therapy that’s focused more on easing muscles and joints to provide relief to patients.
Manual manipulation
Manual manipulation, also known as spinal manipulation, is the typical treatment people envisage when imagining chiropractic treatments. The goal of this technique is to improve the patient’s range of motion, like the mobilization technique, as well as correct abnormal vertebrae, reduce nerve pain and irritation, and improve functionality.
This technique employs a quick, even arm thrust on the patient’s back. This is done on a specified area of the spine that the chiropractor has determined to be out of alignment.
Benefits of chiropractic care for lower back pain sufferers:
Every time an acquaintance complains of lower back pain, a chiropractic recommendation seems to come up. It isn’t because chiropractic care is the new hot health trend. More often than not, it’s because everybody knows a former lower back pain sufferer that refers to their chiropractor as their personal ‘miracle worker’.
Chiropractic care offers a wide variety of benefits to people dealing with back pain, and a lot of those benefits reach beyond simply relieving pain and actually improve the body’s functionality over time. Some of the most stand out benefits chiropractic care provides to patients include:
Proper assessment
Lower back pain can be difficult to pinpoint on your own. Without finding a cause, it’s difficult to figure out the cure.
A chiropractor will go over your symptoms, daily activities, and discuss details with you such as the onset and intensity of your pain. They’ll also go over your medical history with you and may perform an X-ray or MRI scan to better determine the root of your back pain.
They will be able to properly assess your lower back problems to develop an appropriate plan for therapy. Many times, patients are first referred to a chiropractor by their general physician before the physician attempts to implement medication therapies or alternate diagnosis.
Because chiropractors are experts in the field of spinal conditions and back issues, they are able to assess the patient’s condition with more precision than some other practitioners. They are alsothen able to provide the correct therapy that will bring the patient a lasting solution.
Noninvasive therapy that provides relief
In some extreme cases, surgery is the only option for back issues. Often there are other options for patients, and it’s suggested that surgery is considered only as a last result. Chiropractic therapy allows patients to seek care in a safer, noninvasive way.
In chiropractic practices, there’s no reliance on what has become so common in the modern age: medication, surgery, and invasive testing and procedures.
The adjustments in the therapy go through different stages, tailored to the patient’s situation and needs, to gradually bring the back and spine into proper alignment.
With gradual repositioning, muscles ligaments don’t undergo undue strain that can exacerbate pain issues. Adjustment therapy generally starts with less intense sessions, and progresses to become more involved as needed.
Patients with chronic pain, posture, and misalignment issues have regular appointments to continue improving their comfort and flexibility. For many patients that experience lower back spasms and pain flare ups frequently, chiropractic therapy can often prevent or reduce these episodes.
Chronic lower back pain sufferers (where they experience a mild or moderate to severe level of lower back pain daily, for at least 3 months) make up about 3 to 10% of the nearly 80% of individuals that will experience back pain in their lifetime.
That makes a safe, noninvasive treatment plan all the more necessary to avoid (whenever possible) potentially addictive medications and repeat surgeries.
Long term relief
Chiropractic care also offers back pain sufferers something treatment by medication can’t: long term relief through therapeutic care. Readjustment treatments allow the body to “relearn” proper alignment and improve strength. This leads to the body becoming more capable of sustaining physical activity and physical stress of daily activities without over straining and causing aches and pain.
The added benefit is that patients also experience a measure of immediate relief. Through regularcontinued treatment, the relief is increased, as is overall musculoskeletal functioning. Chiropractic care is now backed by many studies that show the therapy’s value and effectiveness.
This is especially true when the patient makes regular visits to continue therapy and to ensure that progress and relief is continuing in a positive direction.
Reduced swelling and inflammation
Inflammation of joints and ligaments in the lower back are a frequent source of discomfort. This can lead to greater issues that ultimately cause further pain. For example, creating pressure on nerves and leading to pain throughout the back, extending through to the hips, buttocks, and legs or arms.
Repositioning the skeleton aims to put your body back into its proper, balanced alignment. Joints, tendons, and vertebrae that may have begun to intercede in another joint or vertebrae’s place are adjusted by the chiropractor to assist them to return to their proper alignment.
This relieves pressure and tension on the irritated areas which in turn reduces inflammation.
Improved flexibility and strength
Chiropractic adjustments offer more benefits beyond only mitigating the damage to physical function that results from back problems. Chiropractic therapy can even bring patients to a better level of health than before.
When lower back strain and sprain reduces a patient’s range of movement, readjustment therapy helps to restore that movement.
With regular treatment, the patient’s original flexibility is reclaimed. It’s often used in conjunction with physical therapy (when a patient has already been prescribed physical therapy), as it provides the existing therapy with a substantial boost.
This boost is thanks, in large part, to the ability of chiropractic therapy to significantly speed up progress in physical therapy regimens. It comes with the added bonus of often accelerating (and at the very least providing a good deal of assistance to) the body’s natural healing processes that physical therapies seek to create in their patients.
Beyond simply restoring the patient’s original condition, many chiropractic patients actually experience an increase in their muscle tone and strength. They also enjoy an improved range of motion and increased flexibility beyond their original capability.
The increased strength and flexibility lead to a stronger lower back that can handle a wider range of activities without pain and physical stress.
By creating better muscle tone, the hard-working muscles of your lower back that strategically support the rest of your body are of course, stronger. As a result, these muscles are more capable of continuing to support you without causing muscle fatigue, soreness or tenderness, or pain.
Call Your Cumming Chiropractic Today
As the healthcare industry expands, there are always emerging therapies that claim to relieve pain and improve physical comfort. Many of these new therapies unfortunately rely on medication or invasive procedures that can do a patient more harm than good.
That’s why so many doctors and patients are turning to chiropractic therapy as one of their primary steps in treating lower back pain.
As a treatment strategy, it shows proven results that ultimately improve the lives of patients. Before moving on to more intense or invasive treatment regimens, most medical associations advise patients to seek chiropractic therapy when beginning any treatment routine, and often they recommend it as a way to enhance other therapies and continue progress in relieving back pain.
Chiropractic care is a safe, effective way to relieve your back pain. Call us at Arise Family Chiropractic today to see how we can help you ease your lower back pain.