Relieve Low Back Pain: Cause, Source and Symptoms
As a physical therapist in Toronto who treats a lot of low back pain, a significant part of my job is to educate my clients on how they can become their own healers.
My goal is to not only enable them to get themselves out of pain, but to keep them that way.
Permanently.
As part of my client education, I always define three words:
Cause. Source. Symptoms.
By defining these, my clients should have a better understanding of what it really takes to relieve their low back pain and get back to enjoying life.
Enjoy your life, pain free.
The Cause: The producer of an effect.
For low back pain, the end effect is a negative one. The “cause” is what leads to the direct, or more often, indirect, production of the pain, pathology and dysfunction. For example, in some low back pain cases, repeated lumbar spine flexion and rotation movements put excess pressure on the discs. The discs wear out and bulge. This bulge in turn puts pressure on a nerve root, which then leads to pain to shooting down the leg.
In other cases, the cause may be repeated poor postures (think slouching in front of a computer or TV) for hours on end. This then leads to stretching or trauma over time to certain tissues such as the ligaments. These tissues will then become injured and painful.
Notice how the cause was the repeated movements or postures which then in turn injured the discs or ligaments.
The Source: The tissue that is irritated, injured or involved that directly leads to the production of pain.
In many low back cases this can be the facet joints, the vertebral discs, nerve roots or ligaments, to name a few.
Disc Bulge: Why did it happen?
Notice how if you were to only look at the source of the pain, you wouldn’t take into consideration the reason that the disc is bulged in the first place or the reason the ligament was stretched excessively.
The Symptom(s): This is what you feel as a low back pain sufferer.
remember him?
Keeping with the same examples, in the first case you would feel the shooting pain down your leg (aka sciatica). Maybe some numbness, tingling or muscle weakness as well. In the ligament sprain case, you may feel some tightness or protective muscle spasm in the area around the injured site with localized aches and pains.
Now if you were only dealing with the symptoms, you’d deal with less than if you were just looking for the source tissue and even less than if you were looking for the cause!
Basically, you’d deal exclusively with stopping that immediate pain.
You might use hot packs, cold packs, pain medication, muscle relaxants or other modalities such as interferential current. You may avoid painful movements and take plenty of rest.
The easy stuff.
Notice how if you were only to deal with the symptoms, you’d just mask the deeper underlying issues.
To recap, as a physical therapist who treats a lot of low back pain, my first priority is to educate my client, to empower them to become their own healer.
To do that, they must learn a very important lesson:
Separate the cause, the source and the symptoms so you don’t miss out on identifying and removing the real reasons that you are suffering from low back pain.
Dev Chengkalath