One of the most common complaints doctors hear about from their patients is low back pain, so if yours is bothering you, you aren’t alone. Almost daily I get asked about why someone’s back is bothering them and how they can help it. Luckily, I have a few ideas. First, let’s go over how you got to where you are.
Low back pain can come on for many different reasons. Degenerative disc disease and osteoarthritis are two that most cannot avoid. Like to say it happens to the best of us. With that being said, the best way to hold it off is by moving your body and your joints. The human body was made for movement and craves it. One way that everyone can begin moving around is by taking a walk. We live in San Antonio, if it’s in the triple digits that day, another way to get movement into your life and staying cool is by swimming or doing aqua-aerobics.
Most of the time, we can relate low back pain to a weakened core (the core is a whole other blog post in and of itself, and we will get into the nitty gritty at another time). In this scenario, patients will come in and say “I bent over to pick up a pen off the ground and couldn’t come back up”. It’s not like that pen weighed 150 pounds, it’s the fact that they don’t have strong core and they bent over the wrong way one too many times (the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back). So, if you don’t want to be one of those patients, then you should ALWAYS be using your legs to pick things up (yeah, even that pen that you dropped on the ground).
When I was in chiropractic school a colleague always bent at his knees and squatted to grab his backpack at the end of the day and said he didn’t want to waste his “flexion-dollars”. I really like that concept, the fact that you only have so many flexion-dollars you can spend in one life, so use them wisely and save them in your bank.
Now, you’re on a chiropractic blog, so of course I’m going to talk about why chiropractic is great at helping low back pain. Like I said earlier, your body craves movement and as a chiropractor that’s exactly what we do when we are adjusting patients. We look for joints that are hypomobile, or aren’t moving as much as they should and then put motion into the joint so we can restore normal biomechanical function. It doesn’t matter how you’re adjusted, whether it be manual or instrument assisted, an adjustment is an adjustment is an adjustment.
If you’re experiencing low back pain and live in the San Antonio, TX area, we would be happy to help you get out of pain. You can get on the schedule by calling (210) 323-2163.
