WHAT DIFFERENT TYPES OF BACK PAIN DO YOU TREAT?

 

We treat various kinds of back pain, of all different sources or etimology. Specifically, it relates to what part of the spine or the back we’re discussing here. When you look at the facets or the joints of the spine, you’ll notice that the neck, the mid-back and the low back are all at different angles. These angles dictate motion, correct?

LOWER BACK PAIN TREATMENT

So when you look at the lumbar spine, the low back, you’ll see that the facets or the joints of each segment of the spine are at this angle. So what it does is it allows for forward flexion. So, for example, what we see in the lumbar spine, low back pain, are issues related to ergonomics, mechanical issues like posture, disc herniations, trauma, repeated use, overuse.
When you move up the spine—sciatica, by the way, is another very common neuropathy that we see in the low back.

MID BACK PAIN TREATMENT

Moving up the spine, you go kind of to the mid-back, in between the shoulder blades or what’s called intrascapular region. These are more postural-type issues. I’ve noticed people who have forward head carriage. When their chin protrudes past their sternum significantly, you’ve got to think, the postural muscles on our back have to immediately grab on to our heads to prevent us from falling over, right? So these have to work extra hard. And it creates all sort of asymmetries, muscle imbalances, spasms, kind of that ache that you get when you have to readjust your chair every hour or so when you’re sitting down at work.

UPPER BACK PAIN TREATMENT

And then, moving up the spine from that, we have cervical problems. Neck pain is a very common issue. I probably see up to a hundred cervical patients every single week, some of them chronic, some of them acute, but most of them are related to poor posture. For every one inch that your chin protrudes past your sternum, your neck has to carry the equivalent of almost two more heads. When you think of this astronomical number, you realize how important posture is.

The way you sleep…
So, again, all of these fall under the umbrella of mechanical pain. But depending on what part of the spine you’re talking about, each have a very particular symptom. Cervical pain sometimes causes headaches. You’ll feel the headaches start in your neck. It’ll kind of cover the sides of your head and go to the frontal lobe. So these are things that we look at here. And we look at them very detail. And we account for your entire lifestyle when we address these issues.

 

HOW DO YOU DIAGNOSE BACK ISSUES?

Diagnosing back issues is a great question and is the key to having a good prognosis for the patient. Being able to distinguish pain or dysfunction—which are usually the same thing, by the way—from tendons, ligaments, muscles, is there osseous, is there another pathology involved.

So, we have numerous orthopedic exams. We have numerous testing methods to be able to rule out each of these one by one to kind of specific on the particular exact cause of what’s causing the pain or dysfunction.

And we address it from that point on. But the key to a good patient outcome is correct diagnosis. And we really pride ourselves on being able to isolate the specific root cause of these mechanical issues that we see in all of our patients.

 

WHAT TREATMENT OPTIONS ARE AVAILABLE FOR BACK PAIN?

There are many treatment options available for back pain as there are many different kinds of back pain. For example, let’s take a common one, sciatica, a.k.a. compressive neuropathy. Sciatica, root sciatica or true sciatica is when the sciatic nerve is being impinged by an object. It’s physically being impeded upon, which symptoms will, 100% of the time, be to the toes.

So if you’re feeling these symptoms—the numbness, the tingling, going down the back of your leg all the way to your toes—that is very likely going to be root sciatic with simultaneous kind of discomfort in the low back.
The answer to this would be to raise the object to let the nerve breathe and to fire correctly. So traction, whether it’s axial traction or flexion distraction, is one very effective means of correcting neuropathies of all sorts of different kinds. Carpal tunnel is another compressive neuropathy.

Traction is decompression of the spine. When we think, our whole lives, gravity and poor posture is constantly compressing our spines. It could lead to early degeneration. So spinal decompression becomes very vital to the health of our spine and our nervous system.

 

DOES SPINAL DECOMPRESSION RELIEVE BACK PAIN?

Spinal decompression does relieve back pain, more specifically depending on the origin of the back pain. If it’s a compressive neuropathy such as sciatica where there is a nerve that is being impeded upon by an object, and therefore sending numbness and tingling down the back of your legs likely to your toes, spinal decompression has shown to be very effective than the treatment of neuropathies—at least mechanical neuropathies.

Gravity is constantly compressing our spines. And at some point in our lives, all of us will have spinal degeneration. Therefore, spinal decompression becomes crucial and vital to our spinal health.
There’s another process called flexion distraction which is similar to axial traction. And it causes kind of the pumping of the spine. It’s flexion distraction of the neutral spine that allows for a process called imbibition which is the absorbing of the nutrients into the disc because we always want our disc to be fluid.
Spinal decompression works as such.

When you look at any compressive neuropathies such as sciatica, sciatica is basically when—at least root sciatica stemming from a disc, which is the most common cause, is this. This person right now is facing to the left (to your right, to my left). What happens is when you flex at the spine, eventually, this happens. This is a disc protrusion that’s causing sciatica symptoms. This is your nerve. This is the disc. The disc presses against the nerve.

Our goal is to decompress the spine and suck that disc back in essentially.
These are based on the patient’s severity, based on patient’s weight, based on the patient’s age. But in many cases, spinal decompression can be very helpful if done by the correct practitioner.

 

WHAT CAN I DO TO RELIEVE BACK PAIN AT HOME?

There are many tools and resources that people can do in their houses or outside of a doctor’s office that can significantly help them to not only prevent back pain or to deal with the issues that they currently have.

Most of our lives, most of us are flexed, meaning we bend forward, whether we’re sitting at the office, at the dinner table, driving in the car. The majority of people will benefit from minor, mild extension, meaning bending slightly back.
There’s a whole slew of different very helpful, useful exercises that people can do, but it’s very individually specific to that particular patient which, therefore, calls for a correct examination of that patient.
So, are there things people can do at home? A hundred percent, there is.

I would say almost every single human being can do something in their house or outside of a doctor’s office to significantly help their future and their present health. But they need to be examined because the exercise or the stretch or the strengthening exercise that’s going to be given to them needs to be very specific for that individual, and not just some stamped exercise that people try to apply to the masses.

 

WHAT ARE SOME SYMPTOMS THAT MAY SUGGEST THAT I HAVE BACK ISSUES?

There are many symptoms that patient don’t really realize is directly resulting from a spinal-related or joint-related issue. For example, every now and then, I’ll have a patient tell me, “You know, my gluts, my posterior or my feet or my fingers go numb every now and then. But it doesn’t happen that much.” Well, that going numb is our brain’s way of informing us that there’s a nervous system issue. It’s actually a good thing. It’s our body’s warning mechanism of letting us know that there’s an issue.

People always tell me that “Oh, one of my legs is longer” or “Some doctor told me one leg is longer.” I personally have seen very rarely to be a congenital short leg. Usually, it’s because of the pelvis. It’s a pelvic-related issue where the pelvis isn’t functioning correctly, when one ilium moves not in parallel as the opposite ilium. What it does is it creates a short leg.

So, during gait, what appears to be a short leg may just be a dysfunctional ilium. And in most cases, it isn’t. We’ve had great success treating that because it relieves hip pain, knee pain, ankle pain—oftentimes, even neck pain, because this is the kinetic chain of the human body.