First, don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of you eliminating your low back pain. A lot of people present to my office seeking just that, relief of pain. It can be a strong motivator and I understand. 

What I want to do is take a look at pain and explore it a little more. In our culture we view pain as the enemy to be defeated at all costs when pain has a lot to offer us if we adopt a different perspective. 

I view pain as one of the languages the body speaks. All too often in our culture we seek to shut down that message. Look at all the pain medications and their dangers:

The overuse of painkillers can cause:

• Nausea.
• Dizziness.
• Drowsiness.
• Sweating.
• Depression.
• A weakened immune system.
• Slow breathing, which can lead to respiratory failure.

The more popular over-the-counter pain medications are not without their own dangers:

• Acetaminophen / Tylenol: liver damage, the most common cause of acute liver failure
• NSAIDs like Ibuprofen: increased risk of heart attacks and stroke, stomach ulcers

And, the dangers of prescription pain medications goes without saying given the current opioid crisis. 

A Different Goal

As a chiropractor I work with the spine and every day I encounter people who have experienced episodic neck or back pain for years. They typically would take some pain medication and maybe use ice or heat until the pain subsided. When the pain was gone they assumed the problem was gone as well. 

When I examine their spine I often know all is not well. X-rays will often reveal fairly advanced degenerative arthritis, called DJD. This could have been avoided or greatly minimized had they dealt with their pain in a different way. 

What is the Message of Pain?

Pain comes for a number of reasons. When we injure ourselves the pain is a signal of damage to tissues and it serves to keep us from injuring ourselves further by limiting our movement. 

At times outside of acute injury pain is at the very least a sign of irritation, inflammation, and imbalance. Contrary to what you might have been told, pain and anti-inflammatory medication do not…

• Significantly reduce inflammation
• Restore balance
• Facilitate healing 
• Prevent joint degeneration

Pain is a message of imbalance in the body. Perhaps we might want to address that rather than covering it up. 

If the oil light in your vehicle goes on do you place a piece of tape over the light so you don’t have to look at it? Of course not, you check the oil. A quart or two of oil is a lot less expensive than a new engine. 

Maybe we should approach the body with the same goal.

The Right Goal with Back Pain

Acute and chronic back pain have different messages and therefore different goals. Acute pain is often a sign of injury, tissue damage, and inflammation. The pain is part of the inflammatory cycle and inflammation is an important stage in healing. The message of acute pain is to limit your activities and movement to avoid further injury. Anything you do from self-care to chiropractic care is best directed at supporting the body in healing. 

Let’s focus on chronic back pain where both the message of the pain and the interventions need to be very different. Chronic pain is a sign of an imbalance that isn’t being corrected. Even when the pain comes and goes the imbalance remains. It just takes that right combination of poor movement, stress, and too much load on the back to trigger an episode. 

With acute pain the goal is to facilitate healing and avoid the loss of function that leads to chronic pain.

With chronic pain the primary goal must be to do whatever is possible to restore the underlying imbalances that are perpetuating the pain. Why is that so important?

Pain is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Oftentimes the pain can be reduced or eliminated for long periods of time but that by itself doesn’t change to imbalance that is the underlying cause of the pain. If you don’t correct the cause and bring the body into greater balance by…

• Correcting structural imbalances and bring the pelvis level
• Restoring mobility to the pelvis and spine
• Restoring mobility to the hip joints
• Engage the postural muscles to maintain balance and motion

…then you will over time experience a progressive..

• Worsening of the imbalance
• Accelerated degeneration of the hip, pelvis, and spinal joints
• Increase in the frequency and severity of pain episodes
• Loss of function, mobility, comfort
• Reduction in your ability to fully participate in life

Pain is the body’s way of getting your attention. If we pay close attention we will often notice changes in comfort, mobility, ease of movement well before the onset of pain. But, our culture has not been encouraged to pay attention to our bodies. 

More often than not we treat our body like we do a car, often worse. At least we perform regular maintenance on our cars from oil changes to tire rotations. We let our bodies go, try to cover up the pain with medication and then want to show up in a doctor’s office to get fixed. Too often this means medication that does nothing but alleviate our symptoms. 

The cost is that over time the imbalance that is causing the pain worsens. The body is always attempting to achieve balance and this causes compensation in an effort to restore balance. All of it creates more and more pressure and tension and the ultimate result is tissue breakdown. 

Scar tissue develops around joints that further limits motion and this restriction adds stress to the joints that accelerates joint breakdown leading to arthritis. Getting out of chronic back pain is obviously desired but if you want to avoid more significant long term problems the goal needs to be to correct the imbalance that is leading to the pain. 

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