Combined Stretching, Strengthening Best Management for Low Back
Often my patients ask me “What is the best method of maintaining my low back on my own to avoid pain and re-injury?”
Combining stretching and strengthening, along with cardiovascular routines for stamina, function to minimize low back pain and injuries.
Personalizing your conditioning workouts to your back condition and your goals is also essential to maintenance of a healthy spine. Runners should do more lower-extremity stretching and “cardio” workouts, where a swimmer would do more upper-extremity and possibly strengthening activities. A proper warm-up and cool-down prior to and following exercise is mandatory to reduce injury possibilities. I suggest all joints be stretched in a controlled environment, no matter what your sport preference is. A brief “cardio” warm up is always a good idea to get circulation to the body and engage the heart rat to increase in preparation for increased activity.
Always keep a good conscious focus on your body and spinal posture when exercising. Keep the curves of the spine in balance and maintain a straight spine whenever possible. Use your larger, stronger muscles such as the gluteals in the buttocks and quadriceps in the front of the legs whenever possible.
Any continuous irritation or pain should be communicated to your chiropractor to check for asymmetries or imbalances in your structure. Taking responsibility for your own health by maintaining your spine with stretching and strengthening will definitely keep your doctor bills down and enhance your quality of life.
Spinal Decompression Therapy: Is It Right for You?
Back pain can seem to take over your life. Your every thought and action is centred around your back. Patients come to me in pain, desperate to know whether Spinal Decompression is right for them. To help answer this question, Web MD has put together a useful guide about Spinal Decompression. Read more to find out whether Spinal Decompression might be right for you…
Fix your aching back, rebuild your shrinking brain
Chronic pain can bring on depression, problems of memory and concentration, and general brain fog— a fact well known to many of the 50 million American adults who live with pain that has settled in for a long stay. But a study published Wednesday finds that changes in the brain that come with chronic pain can be reversed when the hurt is treated effectively.
The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, looked at sufferers of chronic low-back pain—a substantial slice of those with daily pain — and compared their brain responses to cognitive tests and their brains’ structures before and after they got treatment. They also compared the brain structure and function of chronic pain sufferers against those of a control group without chronic pain.
Compared with their 16 pain-free peers, the 18 subjects suffering chronic low-back pain had brains that were thinner and less densely packed in six specific regions of the brain. Three of those regions reside in the frontal cortex, which plays many pivotal roles in attention, judgment and reasoning. But other regions affected by the thinning help process mood, pain signals and judgments about what those around us are thinking and doing.
Six months after getting back treatments to the lower back, 14 of the original 18 subjects came back for more brain scans and cognitive tests. While several regions of the brain remained thinner compared with controls, one region of the brain—the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—appeared to have regenerated itself in the treated subjects, and was no longer thinner than the same region in the brains of the control group. During a challenging cognitive test, the differences in brain activation that had separated the chronic pain sufferers from the healthy controls also disappeared.
Why might a robust dorsolateral prefrontal cortex be better than one hobbled by chronic pain? Because this area plays a key role in mood, social judgment, short-term memory and higher-order thinking, and any or all might suffer with the loss of cell density in the region.
And when researchers took into account whether the back treatment had worked, the brain comeback of patients freed of pain showed even greater strength. Three of the 14 treated patients reported worse back pain or disability six months later, and when researchers looked at their brain scans alone, it became clear their gray matter had not regenerated itself at all.
“Our results imply that treating chronic back pain can restore normal brain function,” the authors concluded.
Disc Protrusion Definition
What is a disc protrusion?
Your back consists of a column of individual bones - or vertebrae - separated by small cushions - known as discs. These discs serve as shock-absorbing pads and are located between each vertebra.
When a disc is strained beyond its limit, the outer casing may bulge or rupture. The jelly-like inner substance can be squeezed or pushed out to the side or back and touch or put pressure on one of the spinal nerves. This is commonly called a disc protrusion, also known as a herniated disc or a ruptured disc.
Is a Bulging Disc the Same as a Herniated Disc?
What Is The Difference Between Disc Protrusion And Disc Herniation? Are they the same thing?
Probably the most frequent problems of the back involve the discs which are typically vunerable to compression, tearing or protruding. Two of the most prevalent spinal injuries involve the intervertebral discs. Commonly referred to as disc protrusion and herniated disc, quite a few who experience these conditions are uncertain whether they are actually the same.
Both disc protrusion and herniated disc injuries can be painful and unbearable and may worsen or cause damage of the spine as the patient ages. Muscle weakness, loss of range of motion, arthritis and also numbness in the extremities are common signs caused by a protruding or herniated disc.
A protruding disc develops when the exterior ring around the disc tears allowing the internal disc to alter shape and protrude through the fibrous layer upon compression. Similar to a gradually leaking car tire, the gelatinous core of the disc gets bigger upon compression and bulges through the disc’s outside wall.
As opposed to a protruding disc, herniated discs are more sudden and painful in character, and may include the fragmentation and subsequent displacement of other tissues in addition to leakage of the soft inner part of the disc.
