Slipped Discs and Low Back Pain Relief: Knowledge Cont’d
As I’ve said previously one of the easiest ways to understand the spine and its associated structures is to break it up into three component parts.
In the last blog post, I discussed some of the bony and cartilaginous structures that make up the back so today I’ll spend some time discussing the neurological tissues. These include the brain, the spinal cord and the nerves that branch off from them.
Neurology and related disciplines are in constant states of evolution and the study of the human nervous system can be extremely complicated. For the purposes of relieving your low back pain, I’ll keep the information as basic as possible.
You don’t need to know how a car is built to be able to drive one right?
The brain: This is the control centre of your body. It’s the primary component of the central nervous system (CNS) and is responsible for receiving, processing, analyzing, learning, sending, and organizing information from many sources. When it comes to relieving low back pain, this is your most important tool!
The Human Brain: Control Centre
By using your learning capacity, you can start changing the actions, movements or positions (the “causes”) that keep you in pain. And as you know if you’ve been reading any of my previous posts, the easiest way to remove the pain is to remove the cause.
Spinal Cord: The spinal cord is the second component of the CNS. The spinal cord is a tube-like bundle of neurological tissues, supporting cells and associated structures that extends down from the brain through the spinal canal formed by the stacked vertebrae.
Its main functions are to send, receive, and transmit various signals and nerve impulses to and from the brain and other tissues of the body. It’s also able to independently create certain reflex actions or patterns (e.g. the Knee Jerk Reflex: leg kicking out when your knee is tapped by your doctor’s rubber hammer).
Nerves: The nerves of the body originate from the spinal cord and travel throughout the body into the extremities (Bonus Knowledge Bomb: the exceptions are the cranial nerves which originate directly from the brain). Nerves serve a similar function to the spinal cord and their main function is to transmit messages between the various body tissues and systems and the CNS.
Often, but not always, the part of the nerve that originates off of the spinal cord (the nerve root) will be implicated as the source of the pain in various types of low back injuries such as disc herniations or bulges.
The Lumbar Nerves
So there you have it, a quick and brief overview of the neurological tissues that are involved in low back pain.
In the next post, I’ll go over the soft tissues and their involvement.
Yours in movement.
Dev Chengkalath
