Back Pain... Is it Serious?

If you search the web for back pain you will find over 64 million results. The reason for this is that nearly everyone at some time or another experiences some kind of back pain. Low back pain is the most common with pain between the shoulder blades coming in second.

While no one reading this will find it unusual for a chiropractor to be speaking about back pain I will tell you that not all chiropractors will tell you that the back pain you’re experiencing may be due to a serious problem. After all, pain is a warning sign from your body that is telling you something is wrong. Many people experience additional symptoms when they have back pain that include leg pain, tingling, numbness, muscular weakness, changes in bowel function (constipation & diarrhea), sexual dysfunction and bladder control issues.

Do those symptoms sound serious? Well, they are. They are evidence of a serious neurological dysfunction. I will tell you that these patients have what’s called a subluxation. A sub lux what? Is what lots of you are saying right now. A subluxation is just a fancy chiropractic word that means there is a damaged joint, causing nerve dysfunction that is causing a problem somewhere in the body.

When a person gets a subluxation he or she has experienced some kind of trauma that starts the process. Sometimes it’s not a particularly big trauma and goes unnoticed. If left untreated the subluxation gets worse and eventually the degenerative disk disease begins. As the degenerative disc disease progresses in the low back people can develop not just pain but all the terrible symptoms described above including bowel and bladder functional changes, sexual dysfunction and numbness & tingling.

If you develop back pain you should get checked out right away. As with all health issues, back pain is easier to fix the sooner the cause is treated. A good chiropractor is the only type of practitioner that can remove the subluxation for you because that is what chiropractors are trained to do.

Now, to be fair, physical therapy and acupuncture can help to alleviate some types of back pain and some back pain will go away by itself. However, the subluxation will not be gone and that is what is so insidious about your back pain. The pain is often the last part of the subluxation to show up and the first to leave. Don’t be fooled, get checked out. Don’t let the degenerative disc disease progress. www.nkychiropractor.com