What Is Chronic Back Pain
Posted on June 2, 2009
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The doctor labels pain according to how long it lasts and how often it occurs. They do this so they can determine which is the best diagnostic tool and the best treatment to use. The categories can get a little blurry at times though. For example, acute pain can be recurrent pain.
The first kind of pain is acute pain. Acute pain is pain that usually lasts less than one month. The level of pain depends upon what caused the pain. The worse the injury, the more it hurts. Chronic pain is pain that lasts longer than 3 to 6 months. You don’t even have to have an injury still healing for the pain to continue. Intermittent or recurrent pain is acute pain that happens over and over again.
There are lots of pain therapies used for the different levels of pain. You can do some at home while others require a doctor. When you go to the doctor, he or she is going to classify your pain after getting a history or your pain episodes.
A Massage = Back Pain Relief
Posted on October 19, 2008
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A massage is a great way to deal with back pain that’s due to sore or stiff muscles. A good massage therapist can use a variety of techniques to relax tight muscles around the spine. Tight or strained muscles are the cause of many back aches and muscle spasms. A massage can soothe the tension right out of the muscles and spine. In fact, much of what a chiropractor does during back therapy has massage elements.
A massage plays another important role in back pain therapy. It makes you feel mentally relaxed in addition to physically better. The doctors now believe that many cases of back pain are caused or worsened by mental anxiety. Your brain sends messages down your spine telling your muscles to tense and your nerves to hurt. A massage can make you feel calmer so the brain sends a very special delivery – one of peace and calm. That sounds very good to me.
Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation
Posted on September 25, 2008
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When I think of electrical stimulation I can’t help but think of the old Frankenstein movies. Yet electrical stimulation is used as one of the treatments for back therapy. Of course, it’s been given a long medical name which is Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation or TENS. It makes me want to ask which came first - the acronym or the name.
This is how TENS works. A physical therapist uses special medical equipment that can dish up low level electricity directed to the muscle through electrodes on the skin. The whole point of the treatment is to make your brain forget about pain for a while and think about the electrical stimulation. This can be a great temporary solution, but it won’t last. It’s good for those people who really need a break from the pain, but don’t consider it an answer to your back pain problems.