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This article is about conventional treatment for back pain

According to the American Physical Therapists Association, back pain is the most common ailment that causes people to seek medical care

It affects more than 80 percent of adults at some time in their lives.

In the United States alone, about 40 million Americans have severe back pain that they cannot function as they usually would. At the same time, another 31 million suffer from frequent but less severe episodes.

Luckily, conventional treatments for back pain help many people who suffer from it to get relief without resorting to surgery or invasive procedures.

This is very important because these interventions carry their risks and can be expensive over time.

Back and Neck Pain Treatments – Conventional Options

Here are some of the most common conventional treatments for back pain, along with their benefits and risks.

Keep in mind that you should only consider these options if your back pain has been long-standing (at least three months), nonresponsive to more conservative approaches like physical therapy, stretching, strengthening exercises, etc., or after a specific cause for the pain has been ruled out by a healthcare professional.

The following is not meant as medical advice but rather as information to help you make an informed decision about how to treat your back pain:

Future Treatments for Back Pain: Interventional Spinal Decompression

Interventional spinal decompression is one area of medicine that has been making a lot of progress in recent years.

This minimally invasive procedure involves inserting a special needle into the affected disc space and then applying controlled amounts of pressure to the disc using hydraulic tubing.

The goal is to affect the nucleus pulposus (the fluid substance within the center portion of a spinal disc) so as to reduce pain while also promoting healing.

According to research, interventional spinal decompression causes changes in the chemical content of the nucleus pulposus which work together with mechanical changes caused by stress forces from outside sources such as gravity, compression, and repeated bending/twisting movements to improve the overall health of the disc, decrease pain and other symptoms, and prevent future re-injury.

See Flexobliss which aims to provide every back pain sufferer with a high-quality solution

 

What Can You Do About Your Back Pain?

While conventional treatments for back pain are helpful for many people who suffer from chronic episodes of lower back pain, it’s important to remember that these methods have risks and side effects.

Surgery, in particular, carries its own set of significant risks, including infection, nerve injury including permanent numbness or weakness, and even death.

However, there is another option that comes with almost no risk at all – you can use natural supplements or herbs to treat your lower back pain.

As a matter of fact, some of the most effective supplements/herbs for back pain include:

  • Turmeric
  • Devil’s Claw
  • Nattokinase
  • Ginger
  • Boswellia extract

Each of these herbs and supplements has its own individual benefits. Still, they all work in a similar way by targeting the following three things: inflammation, easing muscle spasm/pain signals to the brain, and promoting overall disc health.

 So which ones are you going to try first?

Herbs Or Supplement To Treat Back Pain 

  • Turmeric works very quickly – usually within just one day – and it will also maintain its effect for at least a few weeks after you stop taking it. This herb is often used in combination with other substances such as Boswellia extract or ginger. Those two ingredients seem to enhance turmeric’s effects on the body far beyond what might be expected based on their respective effects alone. One thing to note about turmeric is that if you use it too frequently or at very high doses over a long period of time, your body will begin to build up a tolerance for it, and the effectiveness drops off.
  • Devil’s claw root extract is another traditional herb that has been used for centuries by indigenous people in Africa and South America, primarily as a pain reliever or anti-inflammatory.
  • Ginger has also been used for centuries as a pain reliever and is perhaps most well known for its ability to fight nausea which makes it perfect for people who suffer from both back pain and motion sickness at the same time. It can be taken in tablet form as an over-the-counter supplement, but it’s also possible to find ginger in liquid extract form by shopping at some of your local health stores. Some of these extracts may use alcohol rather than water, so make sure that you check the ingredients label very carefully before buying any ginger products to avoid consuming any potentially harmful substances like lead or benzene.

 

What Is Flexobliss? How Does It Work?>>

What About Conventional Back Pain Treatments?

 Surgery: If we look at the science and not modern marketing hype, back surgery is only for degenerative disc disease (DDD).

Surgery should be seen as a last resort when everything else has been tried.

Even then, one must ask why are we putting damaging metal hardware into the spine of our living, breathing human beings?

This is a recipe for disaster. My guest on the radio show today, Dr. Nick DiGiovanni and Dr. Richard Deyo, have done some research that shows:

Surgical treatments offered for back pain actually reduce the quality of life compared to conservative treatment methods such as exercise.”

In addition, much more evidence points to surgery as useless (and sometimes even harmful) in treating chronic lower back pain.

Chiropractic care/massage Therapy: Chiropractors get good results with acute injury but not so good with chronic low back pain. This has been shown in peer-reviewed studies. And massage therapy also doesn’t help either – studies show no significant benefit.

A study in 2008 concluded: ” There was insufficient evidence of the effectiveness of manipulation and/or massage for nonspecific low-back pain .”

Medication: Narcotic pain medications can suppress serious symptoms, but they do not fix the cause (I’m not a fan).

The powerful drugs most commonly prescribed are narcotics (opioids), such as codeine, morphine, and oxycodone.

They all carry risks, including addiction and side effects that may include constipation, vomiting, drowsiness, etc.

According to Dr. Daniel De Ridder, MD. Painkillers can help to reduce the severity of back pain symptoms. But it is often better and cheaper to treat the underlying problems in the body which cause back pain in the first place.

Pain management and medications are not a solution to your problems with chronic low back pain.

Manipulation: Some chiropractic manipulation can help, but most chiropractors also use massage and therapy – both of which have been shown to be ineffective.

 In addition, manipulation is only effective for acute injury (i.e., less than three months old).

After more than three months, manipulation will cause significant harm to the spine by cracking bone joints without scientific evidence showing it helps.

Chiropractors ought not to do “rare” manipulations as they have no proven benefits over other treatment options.

A recent systematic review concluded that while SMT was associated with improvement in short-term and intermediate outcomes, the small effect sizes were unlikely to be clinically relevant.

Stretching: Most people with back pain should do stretching exercises.

Research shows that certain spinal stretches are helpful as a part of a rehabilitation program for low-back pain sufferers. Stretching can help improve your range of motion in the short term, but it probably won’t fix long-term chronic problems.

How is this possible?

Back pain has more than one cause. Therefore, most treatment options will also have more than one solution…including proper stretches and strengthening exercises for posterior chain muscles (the muscles on the backside).

This chiropractic approach works very well: some simple basic tweaks are first applied before involving deeper manipulations which are often based upon an incorrect understanding of biomechanics.

In fact, chiropractors are taught that the spine does not move at all but rather it’s a “static system.” However, this is untrue and leads to a lot of low-back pain practitioners who have poor outcomes with their patients.

 

Conclusion

As with any type of back pain, it’s important to know what your options are and how well they work. Hopefully, the information provided above helps you do just that for low back pain relief. There is no need to suffer from chronic pain if there are plenty of effective supplements being used by the medical community.

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