Back Pain? What you Need To Know!
Back Pain? What you Need To Know!
BACK pain ranks second to headache in the number of people it affects in the United States. It is the leading cause of long-term disability in people younger than 45 and the third leading cause among those older than 45. Sufferers spend some 24 billion dollars a year seeking relief—four times what was spent on AIDS treatment in 1991.
According to a scientific researcher in back problems, two billion patients worldwide have suffered from low back pain in the past decade. “Sometime during our active lives 80 percent of us will experience back pain to some extent,” he said.
A Cycle of Pain
Make no mistake, back pain does not discriminate. Both blue-collar and white-collar workers are prone to back injuries. Men and women, young and old, can fall victim to this pain. When the pain is recurrent and unremitting, it can affect employment, income, family, and one’s role in the family, producing emotional suffering as well. How?
People find themselves in a pain cycle, notes the book The Fight Against Pain. Physical pain induces anxiety and depression that may in turn lead to even more intense and persistent pain. For example, a young parent or breadwinner may have to deal with pressure from job, family, and friends because of the disability that can result from back problems.
Because people tend to minimize the pain, not understanding how much you are really suffering, it usually becomes the biggest problem to be a lack of understanding and empathy especially on the part of my family and friends. Such pains do not know tell when or where they will flare up, it’s thus impossible to make a lot of plans. You can appear to be quite unsociable, not accepting invitations, not picking up someone’s newborn baby, not smiling, all because you’re hurting. The pain, can control you, if you let it.
Reasons the Back Hurts
Is back pain inevitable? What can you do to alleviate it or to prevent it? When should you seek medical help for your back? Although back pain that is persistent can signal many internal diseases, this article will focus on two sources of back pain—Herniated disks and Muscle spasms.
Herniated disks: are major causes of back disease among young and middle-aged adults. Such disks are often referred to as “slipped disks,” a misnomer, since they cannot be slipped in or out of place.
By the time a person reaches his 20’s, the spongy interior of the disks begins to lose its elasticity and moisture, causing the disk to shrink. But this does not usually result in pain. For some people, however, intense pain occurs when part of the spongy interior herniates, or bulges, through the outer ring of fibrous tissue.
Fortune magazine comments regarding the disks: “Once they’ve degenerated past a certain point, the slightest stress—something as trivial as a sneeze or bending over to move a stereo—can be the straw that breaks them.”
Facts You Need To Know
Disks act as shock absorbers between the first 24 vertebrae, or bones of the spine. These bones are stacked atop one another and form a vertical tunnel, the spinal canal, through which the spinal cord runs. Between each pair of vertebrae, there is a small opening through which a bundle of nerves, called a nerve root, leaves the canal, one bundle on either side. A disk may herniate and press against a particular nerve. This pressure can interrupt nerve signals that convey sensations to and from other parts of the body.
A very painful condition known as sciatica, for example, can occur if there is pressure exerted on the roots of the sciatic nerve. Several that emerge from the lower part of the spine form the sciatic nerve. There is one on each side, running down the back of each thigh as far as the knee and then branching into other nerves. Sciatic pain usually begins in the low back and shoots out into the hip and buttock and on down the back of the thigh, sometimes as far as the calf and foot. As a result, a person may experience foot drop—a condition in which the foot drags because the leg muscles cannot raise the toes. A sufferer may also experience sensations of pins and needles, numbness, and muscular weakness in the affected leg.
If the disk presses on nerve roots in the cauda equina, a group of nerves just below the waist that service the bladder and the bowels, a person may have problems urinating or defecating. These symptoms may be signs of serious neurological problems.
Muscle spasms: A condition that occurs when muscles in the back contracted and relaxed, it joins the ligaments in supporting roles, keeping the spine from collapsing and enabling it to bend and twist. Under strain, however, an out-of-shape muscle can go into a spasm, tensing up so much that it becomes a hard lump. Occurring without warning and temporarily immobilizing a person, episodes of back spasms can be agonizing. One sufferer describes the pain as a “series of earthquakes erupting in your back.”
Doctors agree that muscle spasms occur to guard a person from incurring further damage to weakened muscles. A Time-Life book, The Fit Back, observes: “By immobilizing the back, the spasm forces you to take the best course of action and lie down. This position not only places the least amount of stress on your back, but it allows inflamed tissue to repair itself.”
In order to prevent back strain that often triggers spasms, the muscles of the back, abdomen, and thighs need to stay toned and firm. Lax abdominal muscles, for example, may create back strain because they do not give proper support and are less able to resist the pull of the body’s weight on the spine. If abdominal muscles are well-conditioned, they create a “muscular girdle” that prevents the lower back from arching into a swaybacked position. Swayback, an excessive curvature of the lower back, pulls the vertebrae of the lower back out of alignment.
BACK pain ranks second to headache in the number of people it affects in the United States. It is the leading cause of long-term disability in people younger than 45 and the third leading cause among those older than 45. Sufferers spend some 24 billion dollars a year seeking relief—four times what was spent on AIDS treatment in 1991.
According to a scientific researcher in back problems, two billion patients worldwide have suffered from low back pain in the past decade. “Sometime during our active lives 80 percent of us will experience back pain to some extent,” he said.
A Cycle of Pain
Make no mistake, back pain does not discriminate. Both blue-collar and white-collar workers are prone to back injuries. Men and women, young and old, can fall victim to this pain. When the pain is recurrent and unremitting, it can affect employment, income, family, and one’s role in the family, producing emotional suffering as well. How?
People find themselves in a pain cycle, notes the book The Fight Against Pain. Physical pain induces anxiety and depression that may in turn lead to even more intense and persistent pain. For example, a young parent or breadwinner may have to deal with pressure from job, family, and friends because of the disability that can result from back problems.
Because people tend to minimize the pain, not understanding how much you are really suffering, it usually becomes the biggest problem to be a lack of understanding and empathy especially on the part of my family and friends. Such pains do not know tell when or where they will flare up, it’s thus impossible to make a lot of plans. You can appear to be quite unsociable, not accepting invitations, not picking up someone’s newborn baby, not smiling, all because you’re hurting. The pain, can control you, if you let it.
Reasons the Back Hurts
Is back pain inevitable? What can you do to alleviate it or to prevent it? When should you seek medical help for your back? Although back pain that is persistent can signal many internal diseases, this article will focus on two sources of back pain—Herniated disks and Muscle spasms.
Herniated disks: are major causes of back disease among young and middle-aged adults. Such disks are often referred to as “slipped disks,” a misnomer, since they cannot be slipped in or out of place.
By the time a person reaches his 20’s, the spongy interior of the disks begins to lose its elasticity and moisture, causing the disk to shrink. But this does not usually result in pain. For some people, however, intense pain occurs when part of the spongy interior herniates, or bulges, through the outer ring of fibrous tissue.
Fortune magazine comments regarding the disks: “Once they’ve degenerated past a certain point, the slightest stress—something as trivial as a sneeze or bending over to move a stereo—can be the straw that breaks them.”
Facts You Need To Know
Disks act as shock absorbers between the first 24 vertebrae, or bones of the spine. These bones are stacked atop one another and form a vertical tunnel, the spinal canal, through which the spinal cord runs. Between each pair of vertebrae, there is a small opening through which a bundle of nerves, called a nerve root, leaves the canal, one bundle on either side. A disk may herniate and press against a particular nerve. This pressure can interrupt nerve signals that convey sensations to and from other parts of the body.
A very painful condition known as sciatica, for example, can occur if there is pressure exerted on the roots of the sciatic nerve. Several that emerge from the lower part of the spine form the sciatic nerve. There is one on each side, running down the back of each thigh as far as the knee and then branching into other nerves. Sciatic pain usually begins in the low back and shoots out into the hip and buttock and on down the back of the thigh, sometimes as far as the calf and foot. As a result, a person may experience foot drop—a condition in which the foot drags because the leg muscles cannot raise the toes. A sufferer may also experience sensations of pins and needles, numbness, and muscular weakness in the affected leg.
If the disk presses on nerve roots in the cauda equina, a group of nerves just below the waist that service the bladder and the bowels, a person may have problems urinating or defecating. These symptoms may be signs of serious neurological problems.
Muscle spasms: A condition that occurs when muscles in the back contracted and relaxed, it joins the ligaments in supporting roles, keeping the spine from collapsing and enabling it to bend and twist. Under strain, however, an out-of-shape muscle can go into a spasm, tensing up so much that it becomes a hard lump. Occurring without warning and temporarily immobilizing a person, episodes of back spasms can be agonizing. One sufferer describes the pain as a “series of earthquakes erupting in your back.”
Doctors agree that muscle spasms occur to guard a person from incurring further damage to weakened muscles. A Time-Life book, The Fit Back, observes: “By immobilizing the back, the spasm forces you to take the best course of action and lie down. This position not only places the least amount of stress on your back, but it allows inflamed tissue to repair itself.”
In order to prevent back strain that often triggers spasms, the muscles of the back, abdomen, and thighs need to stay toned and firm. Lax abdominal muscles, for example, may create back strain because they do not give proper support and are less able to resist the pull of the body’s weight on the spine. If abdominal muscles are well-conditioned, they create a “muscular girdle” that prevents the lower back from arching into a swaybacked position. Swayback, an excessive curvature of the lower back, pulls the vertebrae of the lower back out of alignment.
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