When to Worry About Low Back Pain

The bark of low back pain is usually much worse than its bite. The pain almost always makes it seem worse than it is.

MRI and x-ray for low back pain are surprisingly unreliable,1 because things like bulging discs aren’t actually that big a deal,2 most back pain goes away on its own,3 and trigger points (“muscle knots”) are common and can be alarmingly intense but aren’t dangerous.4 Most patients are much better off when they feel confident about these things; the power of justified, rational confidence is a huge factor in back pain.5 Sadly, many healthcare professionals continue to perpetuate the idea of fragile backs.6

Or you could be dying! What are the odds that back pain is something scary?

Continue Reading...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Being jostled in a car accident should only cause a few weeks of pain—so why do some people suffer longer? Are they faking it for insurance money? Is it all in their heads?

Image
The first passenger railroad in the United States—the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad—began construction in 1828. Five years later, in 1833, the country saw its first fatal train accident. As train travel proliferated, train wrecks became “a surprisingly frequent form of disaster,” the historian Richard Selcer   writes . And “the single worst type of railroad accident … not to mention the most frequent, was the rear-end collision.” Passengers involved in these train crashes would sometimes come down with a peculiar constellation of symptoms, including back pain, arm pain, headaches, hearing problems, anxiety, insomnia, lowered sex drive, and memory problems. These symptoms would appear even in the absence of any visible injuries. The condition was known colloquially as “railway spine.” The physician John Eric Erichsen suggested that it might be caused by the “‘jarring back and forth’ of the spine, although he could not explain what exactly happened to the spinal cord as a result.” So write
Read more

Beat Your Back Pain With 5 Exercises

Back pain is as common as getting a cold. Back pain can be caused by a sedentary lifestyle (sitting all day at your desk) or a rigorous workout schedule. Two entirely different situations, but the same outcome: a bad back. You also can experience back pain from a bad mattresses, poor posture, standing too much, repetitive movements (those golf or tennis swings), or pregnancy. If you are experiencing  back pain , you aren’t alone. And no matter what the cause, back pain can be helped by two things: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-freytag/back-pain-_b_8235674.html
Read more