RELEVANT KEYWORDS:
- back pain
- lower back pain
- back muscle spasms
- tight muscles
- strengthening and stretching
- spinal alignment
- skeletal alignment
- severe back pain
- back muscle tension
GLOSSARY OF MEDICAL BACK PAIN TERMS
explained clearly in layman's terms,
excerpted from Free Yourself from Back Pain | Nine Movements to Recondition Your Back for Any Activity
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The Difference
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Most approaches to back pain treat the body as if it were a machine that can be adjusted, as if back muscles are unresponsive objects that, if stretched, will stay stretched.
If you've had treatment based upon this operating assumption and it left you still hurting, you've seen the limitation of approaches based upon this operating assumption. It's why treatment for back pain is expected to take a long time, and why you may have been told that you'll have to be careful of your back for the rest of your life.
The "body as machine" idea misses an essential point: muscle/movement memory controls your back muscles and spinal alignment. If you get a spinal alignment adjustment or do stretches or get massage, your muscle/movement memory resets your back muscles to the high state of muscular tension that caused the back pain to begin with, and you're back where you started, or close to it.
If you have had therapy that treats your body like a machine without regard for your sensibilities (as in surgery, strengthen-and-stretch therapy, electrical stimulation, heavy massage or fast adjustments), you may have experienced a rebound spasm and even more pain. If the rebound pain lasts for more than a day or two, that's not "par for the course"; it's a setback.
Maybe, what would work better is a more relevant -- and more humane -- approach. Address the muscle/movement memory conditioning that controls your back muscles.
Your back is already sensitized and reactive; you want ease. So what if, instead of treating your body like a machine (or with a machine), we bring you to ease with a non-invasive, self-controlled, "low-tech/high-touch" procedure that addresses muscle/movement memory? What if changing muscle/movement memory could take you to a lower-stress, more easeful state even under desperate conditions such as severe back pain with disc bulges or nerve entrapment -- and do it so completely and so reliably that you no longer have to return for treatment or be concerned about a recurrence of symptoms?
This is not a casual, fanciful, speculative "what if" question. It's a germane question with consequences.
The approach presented here has helped thousands of people (not millions, yet) who have already had unsuccessful back surgery or other procedures to end back pain and recover freedom of movement. The results are predictable and highly reliable.
The video, above, shows one such person. This is a good time to take a moment and view it.
What to do, next? The video shows you -- or read on.
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When prescribing a treatment for back pain, the first question a health-care provider must answer is, "What is the cause?" Is it muscular? skeletal? disc? nerve? something more? While always involving one or more of those four, the more effective answer is, "something more", as you will learn.
Pain in the back, itself, usually comes from muscles going into spasm; the pain is the "burn" of muscle fatigue.
When not muscle pain, pain in the buttock or back of the leg (sciatica) comes from sciatic nerve compression, where it emerges from the spinal column, or passes through the buttock, caused by tight muscles.
Pain in the upper back comes from muscle fatigue or spasm, which sometimes displaces of rib heads from their seat(s) between vertebrae.
Disc herniation (bulge), while commonly regarded as the cause of back pain, actually results from tight muscles pulling vertebrae too closely together, which leads to nerve root compression and nerve pain distant from the disc, itself.
Although some health care providers cite ligament "strain" or "sprain" as the cause, that's rarely the case; ligaments grow extremely slowly, whereas back pain lessens very quickly as back muscle tension lessens.
All of these conditions trace back to that "something more", which I will explain in detail.
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The Medical Quandary -- The Patients' Quandary: How to Control Back Spasms
Health care providers, including physical therapists and surgeons, face a peculiar quandary with regard to back pain in general: because their patients' pain so often comes from back muscle spasms, much of their efforts go toward ending back muscle spasms or correcting their consequences (facet joint pain, herniated discs, spondylolisthesis/slipped disc).
Still, according to one physical therapist, the likelihood of a back pain patient returning in another episode of back pain is about 80%. Back surgeries have a success rate of about 15%. The most commonly used approaches to muscle spasms, including massage therapy, help, but typically bring only partial or temporary relief. Has this been your experience?
Patients also face a quandary: money concerns. If you limit yourself to methods of treatment covered by health insurance, you are, in effect, choosing a longer recovery period. Is the money saved worth it? Maybe it is, to you.
However, "somatic" back exercises of the type described and shown here potently support all forms of conventional treatment,
with complete recovery in days or weeks, instead of months or years of treatment, for those who follow the instructions and practice daily. Your trying something new will be rewarded by faster improvement.
Click to see
free instructional video to relieve back pain.
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Why Back Pain Comes On Suddenly
Let's take another look at back pain that casts new light on conventional treatment.
Unless you have had a violent accident, your back pain, sudden or chronic, has been coming for a very long time. Muscular tension builds up for a long time before crossing the point of no return and becoming a back spasm. Then, like the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back," a small movement can trigger a crisis: muscle spasm -- and all the accompaniments.
So, we return to the therapists' quandary: back spasms. What causes back spasms? What controls muscular tension?
The answer may be obvious to you: your brain, the master control center for your muscles; your brain causes your muscles to go into spasm.
Why?
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Muscle Spasms -- Usually Caused by Muscle/Movement Memory Conditioning
Here, the answer may not seem so obvious -- until you understand it: conditioning. Apart from momentary reflexes, your brain controls your muscles. Your brain gets conditioned through repetition: repeated overuse, repeated overstrain, repeated stress. Your brain learns to hold muscles tight "on automatic". It's what is meant by "muscle/movement memory." At that point, your tight back no longer comes from bending or lifting, but from a tension habit stored in your brain. You're always tight, on the verge of spasm or in spasm, and having gotten used to it, you probably don't even know how tight you've become. The problem isn't exactly "all in your head" -- but it is in your brain.
With tingling or numbness, the muscles of your back are so tight that they are pulling your vertebrae (the bones of your spine) so close that they trap and pinch nerves.
So the problem is simpler than you might expect. You probably do not have a medical problem; you probably have a conditioning problem. By relaxing those muscles, you end the pain of spasms. You also free the nerves from pressure and end the symptoms of a pinched nerve.
With the new methods, a muscular conditioning problem can often be cleared up fairly quickly -- past experience notwithstanding.
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Perspective on Therapeutic Methods to End Back Pain
The view of most therapeutic methods holds that back pain comes from weak muscles. They therefore prescribe or practice "strengthening and stretching".
This view is understandable when we consider the following: Tight muscles are tired muscles, and tired muscles feel weak and seem to need strengthening. Tight muscles are shortened muscles, and shortened muscles seem to need stretching. Tight muscles cause postural changes, and postural changes imply the need for strengthening and stretching.
However, if stretching were the answer, people who stretch their back muscles would no longer have back problems. It begins to look as if "The Stretching 'Emporer' has no clothes."
The problem isn't weakness or muscles in need of stretching; it's muscular overactivity and muscle fatigue (tiredness and soreness).
It's simple: When muscles relax, they rest and get refreshed (feel stronger); they lengthen out (no longer seem to need stretching). With normalized muscular functioning, spinal alignment improves, movement normalizes, comfort returns.
A more direct approach, then, is to improve muscular control. People with back pain generally need to address muscle/movement memory -- to end an episode of back pain, to avoid surgery or to recover after surgery.
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Do the FREE 1-week test -- exercise #1 ("Spine Waves"), twice daily.
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