Back Pain Relief

For anyone who is lucky enough to suffer back pain only intermittently, they will forget how much difficulty they were previously suffering after the pain has gone away again. The complaint of lower back pain is one of the most common medical complaints known, and yet, because there are many possible causes, it can also be one of the most frustrating and difficult problems for both patients and their medical attendants to deal with.

The good news is that for most people, back problems do tend to be intermittent – meaning that they are likely to go away of their own volition given time. The amount of time will depend upon the condition itself, the severity of the pain and so on, but for most people, having a ‘bad back’ is a temporary problem.

It is generally believed that once you have suffered a back problem, you become more prone to suffering similar problems again in the future. It is for this reason that even an intermittent, temporary back problem can become a major difficulty for anyone who works in a profession where lifting is essential for them to fulfill the tasks of their job.

As an example, it can be a major career threat for anyone in the nursing profession to suffer a damaged back, because it is absolutely necessary for them to be able to help patients up from a prone position, which necessitates lifting.

What causes back pain?

A simple answer to this question is, it is probably your life that is causing your back pain problem. Using the previous nursing profession example, it is common for back problems to first blight nursing staff because they have made the mistake of lifting a heavier than average patient in the wrong way.

This gives one pointer to a primary cause of back pain for many people. They suffer such pain as a direct side effect of the life they lead, or, more specifically, they often suffer as a ‘side effect’ of the job that they do.

It is a fact that your lower back bears most of the weight of your upper body, and consequently, most back pain occurs as a result of using incorrect lifting techniques leading to strained back muscles and sprained ligaments. Alternatively, it is very common for these sorts of problems to be caused by an individual making a sudden, jarring movement that jolts their back and damages a muscle.

You may suffer a back spasm, or build up stress in a particular part of your back over a period of time that only needs the proverbial straw to break (or at least damage) your back.

Hence, if you have a back pain that you did not have yesterday, the first thing to suspect is that you did something yesterday to cause this pain. It does not need to be something that is particularly strenuous or difficult, and it is not always obvious what the root cause of your pain might be.

For example, it is a fact of modern life that more and more of us spend hours every day sitting at a desk in front of a computer. Unfortunately, your spine is not well designed for hours of physical inactivity sitting hunched over a computer keyboard, and it is therefore feasible that this single activity could be just as damaging to your back as would be lifting an over-heavy object.

It is for this reason that if you are deskbound and working in front of a computer, you should make an effort to stand at least once every hour, and if you can have a short wander round, that makes things even better. Even when you are sitting down, try to change your position and shift your body weight whenever possible, because it is the inactivity of not doing so that can adversely affect your back and cause pain.

A similar proviso would apply to any one who spends several hours a day behind the wheel of their car or truck. Take regular breaks, have a stroll about, and remember to shift your weight as regularly as possible while you are behind the wheel.

If you are unfortunate enough to wake up in the morning with a back pain, it is unlikely that you are going to be able to make the necessary changes to your daily routine immediately.

However, once the pain has abated, that is the time to make changes to your routine. Focus in particular on those aspects of your daily activities that might have caused the initial back problem. While there are obviously specific medical conditions that cause back pain (we will consider these in the next section), more often than not intermittent back pain is caused by a specific aspect of your daily routine or lifestyle.

In this scenario, it should not be difficult to isolate exactly what has caused the problem for most people, and therefore it should also be easy to make the changes necessary to prevent the problem coming back again.

For most people, their bad back condition is only likely to last a few days or a couple of weeks at the outside. In this case, prevention of a re-occurrence is largely down to being able to pinpoint what caused your bad back in the first place, and making the necessary changes to ensure that the same situation does not arise again in the future.Of course, there may be more to it than simply making a small change in your lifestyle.

For example, if you are seriously overweight, this fact significantly increases the chances of you suffering back pain. As your spine and lower back supports your body weight, there is simply too much weight for it to do so properly.

In this case, the only answer that is going to be effective in the longer term is to reduce your weight significantly. Unfortunately, this is not likely to be a speedy process, on the basis that if you are carrying enough excess weight to cause a back problem, it is likely to take some time to shift that excess weight. Similarly, if the cause of your current back pain problem was an accident (e.g. whiplash injuries from a motor vehicle accident), then you may have suffered long-term damage that is going to require a significant degree of medical treatment in order to effect a cure.