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.