Living With Back Pain?
Back pain has become a pretty standard affliction amongst almost every demographic. Most times, the pain is concentrated in the lower back and has no primary cause which leaves effective medical treatment moot. Back pains can suck the joy out of your day, but they are seldom serious.
Numerous new studies reinforce that low-tech methods and even just passage of time work better than medication and surgery to relieve back pain for most people. So while getting a prescription for the pain may seem like an easy route, know that there are quite a few alternative strategies you could employ to both relieve and prevent further back pains.
Posture Training
According to studies, lot of cultures around the world living away from the modern life of the cities do not report back pain as a prevalent malaise even while performing heavy lifting and bending tasks on a daily basis. The spines of these indigenous populations have been shown to be shaped differently (J-shaped profile) from those of us living our modern lives (S-shaped profile).
Posture training engages the spine and muscles to mimic the J-shaped spine to relieve excessive pressure and pain.
Roll back your shoulders and let your arms dangle beside you to align shoulder muscles naturally. Lengthen your spine, not arch, by inhaling and opening your chest and exhale while maintaining the length. This will strengthen the abdominal muscles reducing pressure on the back. Squeezing your gluteus medius or buttock muscles while walking will strengthen them and support your lower back belier.
Active Therapy
A couple of decades ago. bed-rest was a common recommendation for alleviating back pains. It has now been established that this can actually worsen the pain. Commonly, back pain is caused by regular mechanical strain and should be viewed as a chronic vulnerability. Though it has observed to subside on its own with time, active therapies like spinal manipulation, acupuncture, and massage therapy can effectively release muscle and reduce pain.
Eventually, getting low impact exercise like Pilates and yoga can further improve circulation and strengthen muscles and prevent future flare-ups.
Mindfulness Training
Recent studies demonstrate that mindfulness-based stress reduction and cognitive behavioural therapy are effective ways to cope with back pain. Both these therapies encourage the patient to acknowledge the pain and develop skills to turn negative thoughts to positive, equipping them with better pain management mechanisms. They can also alter physical reaction of the brain to pain by reducing stress and improving the body’s own pain relief response.
While it has been successfully shown that back dominant pain is a good pain as it means that there is no nerve damage, it can make a person go down the pain-stress-pain spiral very quickly. It is then imperative to understand that there are multiple non-medication alternatives to choose from, which can help with not just pain- management but also pain-relief.