Effective Therapies for Acute Back Pain

Back pain can affect many area of the body; it can affect the back, neck, shoulders and hips. It is life altering; disrupting your day to day schedule; making the slightest movement painful. Normally it will heal between two weeks to two months. This is the point that your body attempts to heal itself, and rejuvenates the muscle fibers. This is the perfect time to engage in physical therapy to improve progress and have an end result of a good prognosis.

Conservative treatment approach utilizing therapies will reduce pain such as:

Muscle spasm reduction
Alleviating pain
Condition of back muscles
Secondary needs such as sleepiness and depression

There are multiple plans of approach to pain relief. Therapy has many realms; however the focus will remain on physical back pain therapy that can be performed by the patient themselves. The other form of therapy requires the assistance of a professional chiropractor or physician.

There are two categories of therapy; passive and active. Passive is another person performing the range of motion for the patient; and active therapy is the patients performing exercises on their own to strengthen their muscles on their own.

Passive Physical Therapy:

This requires a trained chiropractor or professional physical therapist to perform the range of motion activities to decrease further injury to the patient.

Active Physical Therapy

This is the patient performing assigned exercises, provided by the chiropractor or the physical therapist, at home and to improve the prognosis and speed healing.

What Else Can I Do?

Ice and heat are great common uses for muscle strain. Ice is used for inflammation and heat is used for muscular strain. These are usually for home use. There is special equipment at the chiropractor and physical therapist’s office that can speed up healing and provide temporary relief from back pain.

Iomtophoresis - is used by many practitioners. It is a steroid patch applied to area of pain to help to reduce inflammation. The steroid enters through the skins, this is called transdermal, and is very effective is reducing inflammation and pain.

TENS Unit - Transcultaneous electrical nerve stimulator (TENS) is an electrical stimulant placed at the site of pain and delivers silent electrical shocks to block the nerve passage to the brain tricking the brain in believing that there is no pain.

Ultrasound - Is just what is says, an specially-made ultrasound machine that fits against the skin and delivers sound waves and heat to the affected area through the soft tissue. This treatment offer temporarily relief of pain and helps the muscle fiber to repair more quickly.

If you follow these recommendations and see your chiropractor and physical therapist, they have techniques to straighten the alignment of your spine which assists in aligning your hips and shoulders to relieve pressures on those muscle. Always remember to warm up before you start any exercise program to prevent further damage.

Remedies for Back Pain

The most common site of pain in the United States today is head pain, followed by back pain. Back pain tends to last longer and can interfere with your daily routine. It is the leading cause for days missed at work and emergency room visits. Some people experience back pain so devastating that it is debilitating and requires intense intervention.

Typically back pain is the outward sign of a more deeply rooted problem, so temporarily relieving the pain does not help the remedy the cause of the pain. Back pain is the leading cause of people reducing their capabilities to perform their own activities of daily living. In these cases, they tend to rely on others to do more work for them. Most back pain is short term due to muscle and ligament problems which will take some time to naturally heal. The majority of the time it can be repaired nearly to the condition in which the patient had prior to the problem. Other back pain symptoms can be more serious which requires further and more intense intervention such as surgery.

Most pain in the back or neck is preventable if you stick to a regimen of therapy and exercise. When a practitioner examines you, they are trained to recognize whether your problem is minor and reversible, or more severe and requires more serious treatments. The best prevention of back strain is avoidance of strenuous work, using proper body mechanics, and get help if the project requires more than one person.

Here are some tips for back relief

Rest!

Relieve the pressure off your back by lying on the floor, place a pillow under slightly bent knee’s so you body is in perfect alignment for pain relief. This also allows blood flow to the muscle fibers to increase cell repair which will help to facilitate a faster recovery.

If the floor is not for you, or you find it uncomfortable, use a recliner and assume the same position, it’s a great alternative to the hard surface of the floor.

Apply Heat to the affected area:

Heat allows vasodilatation thus increasing blood flow to muscles and nourishing the cells, which promotes healing and cell repair.

Some people claim the use of moist heat works better than dry heating pads. Although there is no scientific basis, based of the studies that have been published, to which belief is actually a better remedy to the pain. However, it is your choice to use moist heat or dry heat to relieve your pain. Heat is an important part of therapy. Contrary to popular belief, applying heat all day is not the right way to use this therapy. The proper use is using heat for 20-30 minutes a day up to 4 times a day. Too much heat will trigger the body into thinking something is wrong and it will send white blood cells to the area creating more inflammation and creating more pain.

There are many different very effective over-the-counter medications that you can use to help make your pain more tolerable. Medicines such as Acetaminophen, Naproxen, and Ibuprofen are available for you use. Read the labels carefully to prevent adverse drug interaction and overdosing. Keep the poison control number handy, and call your physician if you experience any side effects. If these over-the-counter medications and home therapies do not relieve your pain, then it is time to contact your doctor for professional help.