“Back pain” is a general term that can mean many different things. From nerve pain to strained back muscles, there are various reasons your back might hurt. Dealing with chronic back pain is mentally and physically exhausting, and you deserve relief. The first step in properly managing your chronic back pain is to know what’s behind it. Use this guide to shed some light on the potential root cause of back pain, and available treatments for your comfort.
Why Does Your Back Hurt?
If you’ve experienced severe back pain before, your first question is probably, “Why?” It might feel like you’re willing to do anything to stop the pain.
Unfortunately, there isn’t one universal cause for severe back pain. If you’re struggling with it, it’s time to examine what might be causing it.
Some of the circumstances that can cause chronic back pain include:
These are just a few of the debilitating problems you may be dealing with. A qualified healthcare professional can guide you to the proper diagnosis.
Muscular Back Pain
Your back is full of muscles that help you sit, stand, and move around. When one of these muscles’ experiences overuse, stress, or strain, you’ll feel it in major ways.
Movement Injuries
If you twist, sleep, or lift something in the wrong manner, you could end up with a strained back muscle. This will feel different than regular soreness after a back workout.
Sports injuries can affect your back muscles. Especially in contact sports and other intense activities, your back faces many risks each time you play. The more conditioned and flexible you are, the less likely you are to get an overuse or muscle strain injury.
Stress
Psychological stress can also lead to muscular back pain. When you’re stressed, your body tenses up in ways you may not even notice. The muscles in your back may become stiff, strained, or generally uncomfortable as a result.
Lack of Sleep
You also tend to lose sleep when you’re undergoing lots of mental stress. Your body uses sleep as the primary time to repair your muscles and make them stronger. If you aren’t getting enough rest at night or you work the third shift, your back muscles are more prone to pain and injury.
Neurological Back Problems
Your nervous system sends messages to all parts of your body using electrical impulses. The central hub for all of the nerves that extend outward from your body is your spinal cord. Neurological diseases and spinal cord injuries can impair your back in surprising ways.
Neuropathic Pain
Neuropathy develops when nerves throughout your body become damaged in some way. This is a common symptom of neurodegenerative diseases like MS. When your peripheral nerves are damaged, they can’t communicate with your brain properly, leading to strange sensations and pain.
Neuropathic back pain may feel like numbness, tingling, burning, “pins and needles,” or sharp excruciating pains. If you suffer from a neurological health condition, there’s a solid chance your back pain is related.
Car Accidents and Spine Injuries
Automobile accidents exert a lot of force and impact on your body all at once. When you get into an accident, even if it’s minor, your back and neck muscles can experience whiplash. In extreme cases, car accidents can also cause spinal injuries.
Spinal cord injuries are very serious. Your spinal cord protects your nerves and secures their pathway to your brain. Chronic back pain, numbness, and loss of limb function could indicate an underlying spinal injury.
Herniated Discs and Pinched Nerves
If one of the cartilage discs between your vertebrae becomes dislodged, it can press on the nerves surrounding it. A herniated disc can spell trouble for your mobility, limb functions, and comfort for years.
Vertebral problems can also pinch the nerves in your back, which results in the same thing — long-lasting sharp back pain. Discomfort from a pinched nerve will likely feel sudden, sharp, and breathtaking.
Lifestyle Factors and Back Pain
Certain aspects of your lifestyle may be causing your chronic back pain and soreness. These factors aren’t considered diseases themselves, but they can lead to chronic health problems that become long-term conditions.
The following are risk factors for chronic back pain:
Obesity
Poor posture
Sedentary lifestyle
Overtraining
Poor nutrition
Labor-intensive jobs
Improper lifting techniques
Whenever possible, you should avoid these risks. Steps like wearing a posture corrector and lifting heavy objects with your leg muscles can help prevent chronic back problems.
Solving Your Pain: Back Treatment Options
You don’t have to live in unbearable pain forever. You have options when it comes to severe back pain treatment. Every person has a different threshold for pain, and you may prefer less invasive, more natural treatments than someone else.
Medication
Pain medication will block your brain from receiving pain signals in your back. Medication is a valid option for people struggling to function due to chronic back problems. However, most medications don’t treat the root cause of your back pain. It’s a good idea to consider other treatments along with medication.
Surgery
Back surgery is intense, invasive, and risky, but for some people, it’s the best and only option. Severe spinal cord injuries and disc herniations may require immediate surgery to correct the problem. After surgery, you’ll likely be instructed to perform back exercises to improve your mobility.
Regenerative Medicine
Regenerative medicine, also known as stem cell therapy, for back pain may offer an innovative and cutting-edge option. By utilizing human-derived stem cells to repair and renew damaged tissues throughout your body, these “blank” cells can form into almost any type of specialized cell, making them a potential effective modality to help manage and heal chronic back pain.
Evaluating Your Options
It may take a few different interventions before you experience back pain relief. What’s important is that you don’t give up. With the proper treatment, you can experience mild to intense relief and continue on with your life. Medicine is always improving, and you have more options than ever before.
Around the world, an estimated 1.8 million people live with multiple sclerosis. This autoimmune condition is chronic and can affect your life expectancy. The right treatment options, however, may impact the outcome you can expect. Learn about multiple sclerosis life expectancy and how the latest treatments help.
Understanding Multiple Sclerosis
Multiple sclerosis is a chronic autoimmune condition in which your immune system mistakenly attacks the sheaths that surround and protect the nerves in the spinal cord and brain, called the myelin. A damaged myelin interferes with the signals your brain sends to other parts of your body.
Symptoms of multiple sclerosis include:
Fatigue
Muscle weakness
Muscle spasms
Changes in gait
Loss of coordination or balance
Numbness or tingling in arms or legs
The causes of multiple sclerosis vary and are not always clear. They include being exposed to certain viruses or bacteria. People who had particular infections, like Epstein-Barr exposure, are more likely to develop MS. Other causes may be your environment, genetic mutations, and even how your immune system functions.
Diagnosing Multiple Sclerosis
Getting an accurate diagnosis is one of the most crucial steps if you have multiple sclerosis. A definite test has not been developed for MS, but the symptoms you experience will lead your doctor to perform a physical exam, take blood, and get imaging tests like MRIs.
MRIs can catch any lesions in your spinal cord or brain. These lesions develop as the disease damages the myelin. Your doctor may also perform a spinal tap.
If these tests don’t offer a definite diagnosis, you may have to undergo an evoked potentials test. This test checks for nerve damage by measuring electrical activity in the spinal cord and brain.
Multiple Sclerosis Life Expectancy: Factors to Consider
Newly diagnosed patients with MS who don’t have severe disabilities have a life expectancy of 30 years or more, but lots of factors play a role in determining this number. Your unique circumstances impact life expectancy.
Disability Status
The Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) is an important factor for healthcare providers attempting to provide an estimated life expectancy. The EDSS measures the level of disability in patients with MS. Everything from loss of independent ambulation to cognitive function is measured to provide the EDSS score.
Mental Health
People with MS who experience mental health concerns like depression and anxiety may have a lower life expectancy. This is because mental health significantly impacts physical health and can even worsen the symptoms of MS.
Compliance With Therapeutic Regimen
Following treatments as required impacts how the disease progresses, which then impacts your life expectancy. The type of treatment you receive is a factor.
Lifestyle Changes to Improve Life Expectancy
For many people with MS, making some lifestyle changes helps impact their life expectancy. Diet is one of the changes.
Following a healthy diet helps you manage symptoms while also improving your overall health. For MS patients, decreasing the intake of saturated fats and instead consuming omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids helps prevent myelin loss in the central nervous system.
Adding stress management techniques to your life is another change you can make. Stress makes MS symptoms worse. Trying breathing exercises, meditation, or turning to a therapist. These strategies can all improve your stress levels and impact your overall health.
You also want to add physical exercise to your routine. Physical exercise may help slow down disease progression. Aerobic exercise may be able to decrease inflammation. It can also aid in decreasing depression and other mental health concerns that are a result of MS.
Staying at a healthy weight is also vital for increasing life expectancy. People with MS have a higher risk of malnutrition, and they are more prone to being both underweight and overweight. Adding exercise to your day and improving your food choices will help you correct any nutritional issues you have, leading to better overall health.
Getting better sleep is another important change you can make, as well as quitting any form of nicotine you may use. Smoking increases inflammation, which can make MS symptoms worse.
How Regenerative Medicine Can Help
For people with MS, one promising treatment option is regenerative treatments like stem cell therapy. More people are turning to stem cell therapy because it may be able to decrease inflammation and improve symptoms with minimally invasive measures.
Stem cell therapy uses stem cells, which are the cells that differentiate into the many types of cells in the body. For multiple sclerosis, mesenchymal stem cells are particularly useful because of their ability to repair myelin. They may also have a positive impact on the immune system.
For this type of treatment, your healthcare provider removes stem cells from your bone marrow or fat, preparing them for an injection to reintroduce them into the body. Stem cell therapy is a great option for those searching for minimally invasive treatments that don’t require a long recovery process.
Stem cell therapy gets right to the cause of MS symptoms: the damage of myelin. Unlike other treatment options, studies have shown that regenerative medicine has the potential to help with symptom management, slowing down progression, and provide a better quality of life.
It is also a treatment option that may be less likely to cause side effects because the stem cells usually come from your body.
Living With Multiple Sclerosis
Getting a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis can be stressful, but it’s crucial to know that many people with the condition live full and happy lives. Advances in medicine have made it easier than ever to extend your life expectancy with conditions like multiple sclerosis, especially if you receive an early diagnosis.
Stem cell therapy and other forms of regenerative medicine work to offer you the help you need while targeting the cause of the disease. By combining stem cell therapy with lifestyle changes like exercising and eating better, you may be giving your body the ability to slow down the disease’s progression while improving your overall health.
Many health conditions and lifestyle factors lead to ongoing inflammation within the body. When you have widespread inflammation, it can lead to chronic pain, aches, and other health concerns.
If you want to lower inflammation and feel better overall, you may benefit from an anti-inflammatory diet. Learn more about the anti-inflammatory diet and what it includes below.
The Anti-Inflammatory Diet
While certain foods can trigger inflammation, others can reduce it. The anti-inflammatory diet limits inflammatory triggers and focuses primarily on foods that can lower inflammation.
Foods that Trigger Inflammation
Anti-inflammatory diets limit the following foods that are considered inflammation triggers:
Red meat
Processed foods
Sugar
Fried foods
White bread
Cookies, candy, and ice cream
High sodium foods
Alcohol
When these foods are highly restricted or altogether eliminated, it can lead to lower inflammation levels throughout the body.
Foods that Reduce Inflammation
While the anti-inflammatory diet restricts foods that are triggered, it calls for an increase in foods that can reduce inflammation. These foods include:
Oily fish (tuna, salmon)
Berries
Green leafy vegetables
Nuts and seeds
Beans
Olive oil
Probiotics
Tea
These anti-inflammatory foods are high in antioxidants and other properties that can decrease inflammation. When your diet consists mostly of these foods, you can see a significant reduction in widespread inflammation, which may lead to a resolution of chronic pain and other symptoms.
Starting an Anti-Inflammatory Diet
If you struggle with chronic inflammation and want to try the anti-inflammatory diet, always speak with your medical team beforehand. Making major dietary changes is very impactful and should be discussed with your doctor in advance.
It is important to make sure that the anti-inflammatory diet is a healthy fit for any underlying conditions you already have. It is also important to ensure you are healthy enough to make a major dietary change.
Chronic pain can make even the simplest daily tasks feel impossible. However, exercise can help you manage some of your symptoms by providing pain relief and boosting mobility. Try some of these exercises to gain control over your chronic pain and enjoy a better quality of life.
Stretches
Stretching allows your muscles to relax and relieves painful tension that accumulates over time.
If you suffer from lower back pain, try the following stretch:
Lie down on the floor on your back
Raise both knees toward your chest
Wrap your arms around your knees to pull them in closer
Feel the stretch in your lower back muscles as you rock back and forth with your knees near your chest
Set one foot on the floor and move your other foot so that your ankle is resting near your knee
Pull on the back of your leg that has your foot resting on the floor
This action stretches your glutes and lower back, and it can reduce stiffness and pain when practiced regularly.
Outdoor Walking
Walking can reduce chronic pain by exercising your leg muscles and improving circulation. And being surrounded by nature can offer additional physical and mental health benefits.
Take a walk outdoors once a day to relieve some of your pain. You will benefit from sun exposure as well as the low-intensity movement that comes with walking.
If you are unable to walk outdoors, you can use an indoor treadmill to boost your blood flow and get moving each day.
Swimming
Swimming is a popular low-impact exercise for many people who struggle with chronic pain. When you swim, your joints can remain comfortable as you move fluidly through the water.
Low-impact cardio exercises like swimming get your blood pumping and your muscles moving with less strain on your body. Take a dip in the water next time you feel like exercising.
Relieve Pain Naturally with Daily Exercises
If you practice these techniques daily or weekly, you may see great relief from your symptoms. Chronic pain can be debilitating, but with regular exercise, you can start healing from the inside out.
Pain serves an essential purpose in the body. It triggers an unconscious physical response, warning you that something is causing harm and that you need to react. For example, if a hot stove burns your hand, pain tells you to jerk your hand away before it sustains more damage. In this article we talk about treating chronic pain.
However, chronic pain works differently. Chronic pain may stem from an illness or an old injury you should have overcome, but the pain persists. Some patients experience chronic pain from an ongoing condition, such as arthritis. Acute pain becomes chronic if it lingers for twelve weeks or more despite treatment and medications.
Chronic pain is challenging because there isn’t always a clear cause. Most chronic pain patients try to manage their suffering with medications, therapies, and targeted exercises. Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP) therapy offers a natural alternative option for potential benefits.
Platelet-Rich Plasma Treatments
Blood consists of red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. Plasma binds the three cell types together. When you’re wounded, platelets rush to the injury site to clot the blood and stop the bleeding. Platelets also contain proteins called growth factors that promote healing in the wound.
Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) treatments start by drawing blood from a patient. Then, the blood is placed in a centrifuge to separate the platelets and plasma from the red and white blood cells. The plasma is now called “platelet-rich” and is administered to the injury or pain site.
How Does PRP Treat Chronic Pain?
Once PRP enters the location that causes pain or inflammation, the growth factors in the solution stimulate the body’s natural healing response. As a result, the PRP begins repairing damaged tissue, restoring normal functions, and reducing inflammation and swelling.
As the inflammation in the site decreases, pain and swelling may begin to diminish, and the patient may start to see improvements in range of motion and strength.
How Does PRP Compare to Cortisone Injections?
Both PRP and cortisone injections can provide relief to patients suffering from chronic pain. However, cortisone or corticosteroid injections only provide a temporary solution. In addition, cortisone injections might cause deterioration in the ligaments, bones, and joints.
While cortisone injections provide immediate relief, PRP injections have the potential to stimulate tissue regeneration and healing, relieving pain gradually as the area heals. The treatments may require some time to take effect, but they can provide enduring benefits. While PRP is a new treatment option for those suffering from chronic pain, it offers promising, healing results well beyond masking pain symptoms. If you would like to learn more about how PRP injections can help with treating chronic pain, ContactStemedix today!
When the body experiences damage, pain signals the brain that an injury occurred, allowing the body to react and prevent further damage. However, in some cases, the body’s pain response to injury lasts longer than it should, leading to chronic pain that causes its own harm. One cause of chronic pain is when nerve signals become damaged, sending pain signals even when the body isn’t experiencing damage. In these cases, spinal cord stimulation may interrupt these pain signals, offering relief to people experiencing chronic pain. So what is spinal cord stimulation? Keep reading to find out!
What Is Spinal Cord Stimulation?
Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) is a newer treatment for managing chronic pain that stops the pain signals coming from the spinal cord. It is specifically used in cases where the cause of the pain can’t be remedied.
Patients using SCS to manage their pain will have a spinal cord stimulation device surgically implanted in their spine. The device contains multiple components, including:
Neurostimulator Device
The neurostimulator device, also called a pulse generator, is surgically implanted below the skin of the upper buttock or abdomen and delivers mild electrical stimulations that the patient typically can’t feel.
Leads
Tiny stimulating medical wires, also known as electrodes, are attached to the neurostimulator device that sends the stimulation to the epidural space near the spine. When the leads send their signals over the spinal cord, pain signals can’t communicate, and pain is blocked.
Physician Programmer
This is a computer at the physician’s office that your spinal specialist uses to set stimulation levels and appropriately adjust the neurostimulator device.
Handheld Programmer
This device resembles a remote control that patients can use to adjust their stimulation. The patient can change the stimulator’s function based on activities or varying pain levels.
How Does Spinal Cord Stimulation Work?
SCS provides pain relief by modifying pain messages before they reach the brain. The neurotransmitter device sends electrical pulses through the leads that can get to the brain faster than the body’s pain signals. As a result, patients undergoing SCS should feel a tingling sensation instead of pain.
Once implemented, patients can use their remote control or handheld programmer when they feel pain. The remote control can adjust the location and strength of the electrical stimulation. For example, patients can change their stimulation levels for different activities or days when they feel more or less pain.
Is Spinal Cord Stimulation Effective?
While SCS treatments continue to develop, they may already be an effective treatment method for many patients. For example, patients suffering from complex regional pain syndrome failed back surgery, and other chronic pain conditions are finding relief through SCS. If you would like to learn more about Spinal Cord Stimulation and how it can help, contact us today at Stemedix!
This website and its contents are not intended to treat, cure, diagnose, or prevent any disease. Stemedix, Inc. shall not be held liable for the medical claims made by patient testimonials or videos. They are not to be viewed as a guarantee for each individual. The efficacy for some products presented have not been confirmed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
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