Exercise and Low Back Pain

 

Exercise is the key to low back pain prevention and Dr. Gibson at RTP Chiropractic is an expert with customizing specific treatments to help you achieve your goals.

Duke Medicine and the American Pain Foundation found that up to 30 percent of all Americans experience a decrease in quality of life, physical function, and depression associated with daily back pain. The cause of this pain is due to increasing age, a lifetime of improper body mechanics, and wear and tear on the spine.

Most of us do nothing when we experience back pain. We sit around and hope it gets better, we cut out all physical activity, stay in bed and rest. Doing this over the years can add up over time and delay the healing response. The other extreme is to have spinal surgery, which the American Medical Association recently stated that %60 of back surgeries have failed. The reason for such a high failure rate is due to the fact that these surgeries can be invasive as well as change the biomechanics of the spine and start causing a condition called “Adjacent Segment Disorder”, which was recently added as a diagnosis under ICD-10 coding.

So how do we prevent or eliminate back pain? The best solution is to be proactive but if you do experience back pain, you should do what is called “active rehabilitation”.  Active rehab consisted of stretching, high anti-inflammatory diet (We will discuss this in a future blog post), and the dreaded ice pack. Ice helps fight inflammation, which is one of the main causes of most peoples back pain. We will also discuss this more in future blog post.

Once the pain has subsided, the real active rehab will start. Core stabilizing exercises.  You may ask, what is your core. The “core” is comprised of several groups of muscles including the transversus abdominus, multifidus, diaphragm and pelvic floor muscles.These muscles work together to produce maximum stability in the abdominal and lumbar (lower) back region, as well as coordinate the movement of the arms, legs, and spine. Engaging these muscles is not something that most people do consciously, therefore it is important to learn how to effectively co-contract these muscles while performing these rehabilitation exercises.

There are many causes of back pain. The best way to see what is truly causing it is to have an evaluation by an expert and then go from there. Dr. Gibson is a qualified expert in low back pain and rehab.