Back Pain Specialist
Back pain affects millions of people in the United States each year. Although this pain can have a number of causes, chiropractic care is usually an effective care choice.
Back Pain Q & A
Central Park West Wellness
How does back pain affect patients?
If you have back pain, you already know how difficult it can be to handle on a daily basis. Even life’s simplest activities, such as putting on shoes or sitting down at your desk, can become torturous challenges. In the worst cases, sleeping, walking, and standing will even cause pain.
What causes back pain?
After reviewing all new patient evaluations collected since 1979, the chiropractors at Central Park West Wellness have determined that lower back pain with sudden onset is most often caused by improper spinal alignment and imbalances of ligaments, discs, and muscles. When you have any combination of these issues, even the slightest extra strain on your back can cause a collapse of spinal stability and extreme pain. Once your spine has lost its stability, nerves can easily be impinged by herniated discs or misplaced vertebrae.
How does chiropractic care treat back pain differently?
Conventional medicine tries to treat back pain with rest, medications, and/or surgery. However, even though these treatments may improve back pain temporarily, it will almost always return if the biomechanical factors in your spine that led to the pain aren’t addressed properly.
Chiropractic care seeks to find all of the problems in the spine that initially led to your back pain and deal with each one. The goal of treatment is to fix these issues, teach you to prevent them from recurring, and prevent you from becoming dependent on any doctor or chiropractor for back pain relief.
What happens during chiropractic treatment?
If you come to Central Park West Wellness with back pain, your chiropractor begins by analyzing your spine thoroughly to identify weak areas, problems with alignment, and any other issue that may be contributing to your pain. Next, your chiropractor develops a customized treatment program designed to restore normal spinal form and function to your entire spine.
The first goal of treatment is always to relieve your pain. However, this is only part of the process. Your chiropractor also teaches you about the underlying causes of your pain so you can prevent the same problems from occurring again after you finish treatment.
Lower Back Pain
With lower back pain, even life’s simplest activities can become a torturous challenge. Simple bending, putting on one's shoes, sitting for work or travel, caring for our family, even walking, standing or sleeping can instigate pain. In reviewing in depth, all our new patient evaluations since 1979, it has become clear that even with lower back pain of sudden onset, at least 95% of the time, long-standing imbalances of muscles, discs, ligaments and improper spinal alignment have conspired to create fertile ground for even the slightest daily extra strain to cause a collapse of spinal stability, and pain. Once the spine had lost its stability, it is easy for nerves to become impinged by misplaced vertebrae, or bulging/herniated discs, causing mild to severe pain. One can treat lower back pain with medications and rest, or even surgery to remove the disc or bony material causing the nerve impingement and pain, but unless all of the lower back’s, and in fact even the whole spine’s biomechanical factors are addressed, most lower back pain episodes will recur. Our full spine, comprehensive, approach to restore, as closely as possible, normal spinal form and function, ensures that the nerves, spinal bones, ligaments, muscles, and discs all function together properly, without the nerves and discs becoming irritated. Of course, our primary concern is to first bring relief from the pain and fortunately, some level of relief often comes fairly rapidly. However, relief is only part of the process. We must then analyze each patient individually, to find out exactly where the weak areas are, …the ones that have allowed the spine to deteriorate, and teach that patient what they personally need to do to strengthen these areas so we do not see one back here with the same, or similar problem again. This ensures your ability to help fix the cause of your low back pain and keeps you from becoming forever dependent upon us for relief of the same issue.