The Importance of Spinal Health |
Percentage of Reported Spinal Injury and Back Pain in the United States |
The spine is a complex structure that joins muscles, bone, and nerves. Almost all actions require some degree of support from our spine. Tying your shoe, catching a ball, moving heavy objects; every movement depends on your spine working at peak condition. For that reason, it is no surprise that back pain is one of the most common complaints people have when they go to visit the doctor and it is the main cause of lost productive hours. With back pain, even sitting can be difficult, while work and enjoyment of any type of recreation becomes almost impossible.
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The Structure of Our Spine
The spine is a column of 33 bones that supports everything we do with our upper body. All the weight we carry on our shoulders and arms is distributed to your spine. Every twist and bend is enabled and stabilized by it and the muscles connected to it. Also the spinal cord that the brain uses to control and receive feedback from your whole body is housed in it. Even the legs depend on the spine to support muscles used for walking.
Top Causes of Spinal injury and Back Pain
Most back pain can be attributed to the normal wear and tear on the body due to strenuous activity and age:
- Sprains and strains are the most common injury that leads to lower back pain. Sprains are caused stress that damages the ligaments that connect bones to each other. Strains are caused by tears in the muscle or connective tendons. Both may happen while lifting or twisting without proper posture, lifting something too heavy, or overstretching.
- Disc degeneration disease is one of the most common causes of low back pain, and it occurs when the usually rubbery discs wear out or are damaged. As these discs lose their integrity, the bones they once cushioned begin to rub and compress.
- Sciatica can occur when pressure is put on the sciatic nerve. The sciatic nerve runs from the spine to the legs. As a result, sciatica can cause shooting, burning pain in the legs and feet as well as the sensation of pins and needles.
Symptoms
Lower back pain can be caused by incidents like accidents, but often the pain will be persistent and chronic. Recognizing and appropriately treating the causes of pain are the most important factors in reducing pain.
Lower back pain symptoms fall into a few characteristic types
Lower back pain symptoms fall into a few characteristic types
- Axial Pain. A persistent constant ache in the lower back that may be accompanied by muscle spasms.
- Sciatica. Acute, sometimes shooting pain from the lower back through the leg that can be accompanied by tingling or numbness. Caused by nerve damage
- Sitting Pain. Sitting for extended periods can also cause pain. In addition to the other symptoms, it can be caused by the compression of the discs that cushion the bones in our spine due to bad posture and/or other spinal health issues like degenerative disc disease or a herniated disc.
- Standing Pain. Spinal stenosis is an example of a cause of pain that prevents people from standing with proper posture. Often people will lean on canes, walkers or other objects to keep standing upright while bent into a posture that may not be healthy for the spine, but at least affords relief from the pain.
- Morning Pain. Sometimes lower back pain is the most intense when people wake up, and as they get moving through their day, the pain subsides. This is commonly caused by poor sleeping posture, poor support from the bedding or just stiffness from low blood flow during sleep.
- Headaches. Herniated disks in the cervical spine (neck) can cause neck pain and tension. This can cause a type of headache called a cervicogenic headache. The pain typically originates and is felt in the back of the head.
- Fatigue. The nerve cluster linked to the thyroid gland can be mapped down the spine to the last cervical vertebrae: C7. C7 is the first place to examine when symptoms reported as fatigue, brain fog, or moodiness. Subluxations, or disc deterioration at the C7 vertebrae could mean the nerves and blood supply to the thyroid are being disrupted or cut off entirely. Chronic fatigue flare-ups can be also triggered by mild to moderate muscle and nerve strain. The imbalance in the spinal column, is also a common causes of fatigue, even a relatively minor imbalance could lead to the body wasting considerable amounts of energy throughout the years.
Common Treatments for spinal and back injury
- Spine Surgery: also called spinal fusion, spondylodesis or spondylosyndesis, is a neurosurgical or orthopaedic surgical technique that joins two or more vertebrae. This procedure can be performed at any level in the spine and prevents any movement between the fused vertebrae
- Lumbar decompression surgery: is a type of surgery used to treat compressed nerves in the lower (lumbar) spine. The surgery aims to improve symptoms such as persistent pain and numbness in the legs caused by pressure on the nerves in the spine.
- Injections: Injections can deliver medication such as steroid and numbing directly to the anatomic location that generates pain.Injections are generally used in two ways. First, they can be performed to diagnose the source of back, leg, neck, or arm pain (diagnostic). Second, spinal injections can be used as a treatment to relieve pain (therapeutic). Injections are considered to treat spinal pain after other nonsurgical treatments have been tried, but before surgery is considered. Back injections may help treat two major back pain problems, inflammation or damage to a nerve and spinal stenosis.