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Care is the cornerstone of our practice.

What Is Back Pain and How to Treat It?

Back pain is a very common injury seen in the majority of the population.

Our daily activities often  play a very crucial role in our back pain. If someone has a desk job or if they work from home, they most likely spend a majority of their time hunched over, with bad posture, staring at a computer screen for multiple hours. Generally, a lot of people want to become more active, but they lack the proper biomechanics needed to perform certain workouts and then they experience low back pain. If someone lives in a city with bad traffic or that person has to drive long hours for work, they are often sitting in a position that compromises their back for a long duration of time. On top of that, what if a person gets into a car collision? Their back is already in a compromised position and then you add a high velocity impact to the equation and that results in a more trauma to the body. If we look at our daily activities and the tasks that we need to perform in order for us to survive, it makes sense why a majority of the population has back pain.

How will we ever get out of pain if we cannot stop working, being active or performing our daily activities?

Well with Chiropractic care we can help minimize the intensity and the frequency that a person experiences pain with proper treatment and exercises, so that you can continue to live your life.

Often times, when a person experiences an auto collision it can be very detrimental and traumatic to their back. It may unravel back pain that a person has never experienced before. This back pain may be the result of stress and strain on the paraspinal muscles on each side of the back. The back pain could also result in a disc herniation that irritates spinal nerves around the disc causing radicular symptoms. Radicular symptoms include sharp, shooting, numbness or pain that refers to different parts of the body. The back pain could also be so severe as a compression fracture caused by the auto collision. We refer and recommend imaging such as X-rays and MRIs to properly educate the patient on what may be the root cause of their back pain. A number of times,  patients discover a slight curvature in their spine or scoliosis. However, the patient has never experienced back pain like this prior to the accident. Most times the scoliosis is not caused by the accident, but due to prior events that we have experienced throughout life that cause a gradual change in the curvature of a spine. The auto collision could irritate those muscles that have already been compensated for so long and create pain more prevalent on one side of the curvature than the other.

As Chiropractors we are highly trained and skilled in treating your back pain.

We refer and recommend imaging to accurately diagnosis and educate the patient on the root cause of their back pain. The proper imaging also helps us know what areas we can and cannot adjust. For instance: if a patient has a spinal fracture, we will not adjust the area.

We primarily start most patients on passive care, which includes E-STEM, Myofascial therapy, Heat or Ice. Whenever the patient is out of the acute phase, we will introduce the chiropractic adjustment to them. The Chiropractic adjustment is a specific thrust into a joint used to improve motion and physical function. The adjustment can be performed with hands or an activator.

We combine passive therapy with active therapy to correct and strengthen certain areas of the body or muscles that are not working correctly. The exercises that we use are not meant to be extremely exerting or provide a great amount of fatigue. The exercises and stretches are used to create proper biomechanics, improve function and range of motion to specific areas. Overtime these proper movements will eventually become muscle memory in hopes of decreasing the frequency of back pain.

Throughout all of the treatments and therapies we are constantly documenting and measuring the progress of the patient. These measurements include patient feedback, as well as range of motion, muscle testing and deep tendon reflexes.

As mentioned before, we are constantly moving, constantly under stress and strain from our jobs and daily activities. It would almost be impossible to eliminate back pain; we would have to stop everything. However, we can not afford to stop moving, because our lives and others depend on our productivity. With Chiropractic care and proper therapy, we can help minimize the intensity of pain and the frequency of a person’s pain. Combined with the proper exercises and stretches we can alter those faulty movements and create the proper biomechanics needed to sustain the progress made for a longer period of time.