Hands up if you want to make your neck pain, headaches, or back pain a thing of the past? Do you want to put it behind you and move on without that nagging distraction? Of course, you do.

You may have even tried a bunch of treatments – massage guns, anti-inflammatory medications, physical therapy, massage, stretching – in an attempt to solve the riddle of chronic pain.

In this post, I’ll share the most common rookie mistakes to avoid when it comes to solving the riddle of chronic neck pain, back pain, headaches and other challenges 

It’s a pretty chunky guide, so grab yourself your favorite beverage and let’s dig in.

What is the Missing Key to Chronic Pain?

Before you work on getting the thing you most desire in the world, barring another injury, you need to understand what drives the vast majority of the chronic pain we are talking about.

The vast, vast, vast majority of chronic neck and back pain starts and is perpetuated by altered spinal mechanics. Meaning that through injury or other causes you have experienced a loss of proper motion in the joints of the pelvis and spine. 

In other words, the overwhelming majority of chronic neck and back pain is mechanical. 

And for all of the experts out there, that means spinal facet joint dysfunction and sacroiliac misalignments.

For the person dealing with recurrent or chronic pain that means:

• You have lost healthy motion in your pelvis or spine that is causing much pain
• The initial focus on improving your pain lies with restoring joint mechanics
• Maintaining healthy joint function is one key to long term pain relief

With that out of the way, let’s look at the top mistakes I see chronic pain victims make, and what you can do instead.

The Number One Rookie Mistake: Using a Chemical Solution for a Mechanical Problem

My client Mary wanted nothing more than relief from her long term hip pain. When she came to me, she had tried her primary care physician who diagnosed hip arthritis and prescribed anti inflammatory medication. She was referred to an orthopedist who offered an injection into her hip. 

She came to my office, Life Chiropractic in Grass Valley where I took a different approach. We found a problem in the lower lumbar spine (low back) and corrected the misaligned joints there. She’s back doing whatever she wants – running for the first time in years.

Did you spot it? Can you see where Mary Went wrong in trying to find relief? Actually it was her doctors who went wrong when they wanted to apply a chemical solution to a mechanical problem. 

That’s right, it was the medical near-sightedness of being limited to drugs and injections and seeing her problem as a chemical problem. 

Thankfully, she wanted something different, she ended up with more relief in a few weeks than she had experienced in years.

Relying on Medications can be easily made because:

• Medical Doctors are not trained in identifying joint mechanical problems
• The primary tools of medicine are medications, injections, and surgery
• The adage, ‘When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ blinds the medical profession to doing what they do and not looking outside their box

Have you been taking medication for so long that you don’t even know how much it is really helping?

And, are you aware of any negative impacts from the medication? Anti-inflammatory medication is known to cause a number unwanted side effects like:

• Liver problems
• Diarrhea 
• Headaches
• Dizziness
• High Blood Pressure
• Accelerated degeneration of joint cartilage and arthritis

Before you feel bad and guilty, it’s not your fault!

Remember: our medical system is focused more on alleviating pain than it is on correcting the cause of the pain and their primary tool is medication.

What to do instead:

If you have seen your physician or more than one medical doctor then they should have ruled out any other causes for your neck or back pain. 

If you have taken medications with temporary or minimal relief then the next step is to find a practitioner skilled in the assessment of mechanical problems that could be the primary cause of your pain. 

Mistake #2: Physical Therapy

None of us is naive enough to think taking medications for a mechanical problem is the only mistake people make with chronic neck or back pain. If that was it, there’d be a whole lot more people figuring this puzzle out!

The next biggest mistake I see people make is expecting Physical Therapy to solve their problems.

On the surface physical therapy would seem to be a logical choice and they would seem to fit into a mechanical solution. 

In reality the vast majority of what PT focuses on are the muscles. And, while muscles can be a source of pain they are almost always a reaction to a joint and nerve problem than they are the cause of the problem. 

What to do instead:

The likelihood that your pain has a mechanical cause is huge.

That means if you have a mechanical problem you need a mechanical solution. There are a very small number of physical therapists trained in manual therapy. 

Chiropractic is the only profession whose specialty is the identification and correction of spinal mechanical problems. And, the specialists within chiropractic are those chiropractors who focus on spinal correction. Avoid 

Related Post: Chronic is Not Normal

Another: A Corrective Approach

Mistake 3: Not Turning On the Posterior Chain

This one is easy to make, since very few professionals have an appreciation of the importance of the posterior chain muscles.

The posterior chain is a series of muscles that run up the backside of the body. These muscles are important postural muscles and critical to stabilizing the lower back. 

If you are not aware of the posterior chain or of their importance it’s not reasonable to expect you to know the importance of turning them on.

Modern life with all the sitting and activity. Injuries to the spine. These have the effect of inhibiting the posterior chain. And, this makes it more difficult to recover from chronic back pain. 

What to do instead:

First, find someone to correct the structural imbalances and misalignments. Then make sure you get instruction on how to activate and engage your posterior chain. 

Bonus! How to Overcome Chronic Pain with Ease

When I first started to focus on helping people overcome chronic pain, I felt a bit overwhelmed. Look at me now; I have put together a comprehensive program that addresses all the critical elements of chronic neck and back pain. 

This program at Life Chiropractic in Grass Valley is called the Corrective Rebalancing Program.