Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Low Back Pain Sufferers and Chiropractic

By Philip Vincent

Many people go through life in chronic low level pain. Many of them have lived with it so long that they do not even notice it. TV ads blame bad mattresses and want you to buy their better (and more expensive) mattresses, some claim it is due to stress or pollutants in the environment and some people simply find themselves on a steady stream of over the counter pain killers to take the edge off. This constant pain can be at its worst when it is in the lower back as that makes it hard to even move around let alone pick anything up or otherwise go about your daily routine.

Chiropractic can make for a great answer to lower back pain, whether it is constant and nagging or sudden and severe. This is because most of the time your lower back pain is caused by muscles in your back pulling unevenly on either side of your spine, resulting in soreness, a pinched nerve or just plain aches and pain. Another possibility is problems with the spine itself, in which case you certainly want to be dealing with someone who specializes in the back.

Not all chiropractors are created equally or think the same way, however. In chiropractic healthcare, there seem to be two general schools of thought. The first is that chiropractics deals exclusively with physical issues of the spine and back, and its alignment. Practitioners of this traditional form of chiropractic will use only their hands and sometimes the help of diagnostic testing or radiographic images before they make corrections to the alignment of the spine and give relief for low back pain.

The other, perhaps more new age school of thought involves something called a subluxation, which is a single misaligned vertebra which may hamper blood or energy flow up and down the spine. Subluxation based doctors believe they can solve nearly every bodily ill by correcting and preventing these subluxations with a constant regimen of maintenance, and often offer themselves as general practitioners as well, with a complete line of nutritional supplements.

For this reason it is important to look for a chiropractor with experience in sports medicine or who specializes in back pain. They will be able to either identify and fix the problem in your back that is causing you pain, or be able to identify if it is something more serious which spinal manipulation may actually make worse. The spine is a delicate area and one wrong move can leave a person paralyzed or worse. It is important to treat it with care and precision, but with the right chiropractor your lower back pain is in good hands. - 14130

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