If you’ve ever battled low back pain, you know how nagging and exhausting it can be.
Pain medications can cause health issues if taken for extended periods, relief found from injections can be ineffective or short-lived, and some therapies can even make your low back pain worse. Surely there’s something you can do to rid yourself of this pain.
You’re not alone in this pain; at least 80% of adults will deal with low back pain at some point in their lives. How can you free yourself of this pain if most of these treatments are ineffective? The good news is you don’t have to give in to back pain: There are solutions out there.
Unfortunately, there is no one single solution, and it typically takes a combination of efforts and time to get through an episode of pain.
Pain medications
Pain killers and certain types of muscle relaxers can be helpful short-term to relieve debilitating pain and help you get a good night’s sleep when you’re hurting from an injury or ‘my back went out!’ incident.
Long-term use of prescription pain medications is not a great management option. And long-term use of over-the-counter medications like ibuprofen and acetaminophen can increase your risk of stomach, cardiac, and liver and kidney issues.
Steroid injections
Just like pain medications, injections can be helpful for short term, immediate treatment of pain or swelling. Multiple injections can cause tissue damage over time, so their use is limited.
Chiropractic
To treat low back pain, chiropractors use hands-on techniques to manipulate the spine and hips and often incorporate soft tissue work, stretching, heat or cold.
Physical Therapy
I am a huge fan of physical therapy. A great physical therapist can help to assess and treat low back pain. Once the pain decreases and your quality of life improves again, your physical therapist can help you create a preventive routine of exercise and stretching.
Massage Therapy
Obviously, I’m an advocate of massage therapy. I’ve had great results treating low back pain in my own practice. There’s a growing body of research to support the use of massage therapy for low back pain.
This study showed that both weekly whole-body Swedish massages for relaxation and weekly massages focused on the lower back and hips were able to alleviate some of the pain (at least 2 to 4 points on the pain scale). This kind of improvement is actually a bit better than the relief found in over-the-counter medications like ibuprofen.
The study also showed these regular massage sessions can alleviate enough pain for many people with chronic back pain to hit the gym for strengthening and aerobic exercise to help manage the pain even more.
Our goal with your regular massage sessions is to locate the source of your pain and work to reduce it. I want to help to improve your physical function and get your life back on track.
From physical activity and time with family to simple activities like tying your shoes or pulling laundry out of the dryer, low back pain affects every aspect of your life. Let’s work together to get you on the path to freedom from lower back pain.
You deserve a healthy lifestyle, free from pain. Book your appointment here, and let’s get started.
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