When is the medical industry finally going to stop it’s symptoms based approach to back pain relief?
If you have been told your disc is ruptured, or that annular tear is the cause of your back pains, or facet joint arthritis, or bone spurs, or that you have degenerative disc disease…
…please tell me, what does that really tell you? Are these not just mere statements of the current condition of your back?
Doctors are great at diagnosing / labeling what is wrong and ofcourse they can be a great help in telling you what is wrong at the current moment in your back…
…but how come they hardly ever point the finger at YOU and tell/show you how you have caused your own back troubles?
Maybe We – Back Pain Patients – Ourselves Need To Face The Facts…
Lots of stories regarding lower back pain come from people saying they were lifting a bag of concrete, or worked their garden and then all of a sudden, wham, it happened…
….Some even say their back troubles started just because they sneezed too hard…
Please…
…come on, your body is made for movement, look at all the joints in your body. The basic function of joints is to allow bones to move in relation to each other, movement is what we are designed for.
It is time we understand that not only are our bodies made to move, they also need ample movements to stay healthy!
But no MRI scan will tell you that. The only thing scans can tell you is what’s wrong now.
MRI Scans will not tell you how it got that way, nor will they tell you what to do to counter the problem and turn things around again and improve your back health.
Back Pain Facts To Consider
Most of us just sit too much and hardly ever move enough.
Weeks, months and sometimes even years of not moving enough or with wrong posture, WILL cause your muscles to grow weaker or tighter and less flexible.
If you used to play sports, you probably still have pretty strong hamstrings, buttocks and hip flexors…
Here’s what often happens, check your own body to see if this might be you…
Your Leg Muscles Stay In Shape Longer – Making Your More Back Pain Prone
Many guys – girls just as well – used to have pretty strong leg muscles as well as a muscular upper body when younger and more into sports and moving all day…
When we grow older, our leg muscles tend to stay in better shape compared to our upper body muscles…
…even when we gain weight, our legs have to work harder walking our heavier body around. But our stomach muscles just sag and we all know what that looks like.
And it is exactly this combination of still stronger leg muscles and weaker and weaker stomach muscles that could be causing lots of back troubles, let me explain.
Many Back Problems Start With A Pelvis That Is Out Of Proper Alignment.
If your hamstrings, buttocks and hip flexors pull hard on the lower side of your pelvis, but the counterpulling forces of your weaker upper body musculature gets less over time, no one will doubt this will have an affect for your pelvis’ position.
And once your pelvis is out of alignment, some vertebrae above it will be misaligned more easily as well, and this often causes pain in the muscles aroud the spine. Or it could lead to triggerpoints (TP’S) developing in your muscles, causing referral pains elsewhere in your body.
Special Exercises for Lower Back Pain – how many do you know?
Most therapists will happily help you out with massaging, heating and working on your painful spots, but how many will tell you to start a good muscle training & flexibility program to bring back balance in all the pulling forces on your pelvis?
Yet this is what will give you the best long term results, better than massage therapy.
A good program with exercises for lower back pain will make some muscles stronger and others more flexible.
Key exercises to work on are focused on loosen tight hamstrings, buttocks and hip flexors. ANd then ofcourse you want to strenghten your upper body.
I started this article with the question when is the medical industry finally going to stop it’s symptoms based approach to back pain relief?
That is only ever going to happen once we, back pain sufferers realize that lower back exercises that correct the underlying causes of our back troubles are better than symptoms based approaches!…
…Or to put it more bluntly, once YOU understand that you have a part to play in your back’s long term health. And here’s the good news: once you figure out how you caused your own back troubles to develop over time, you can easily figure out what to do to turn things around.
But as long as you and I fall or go for symptoms based approaces, there will always be people who will provide just what we want.
So the question boils down to: when are you and I going to quit our symptoms based approach to dealing with our oftentimes-self-inflicted back troubles?
