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How to fix low back pain

In this article, you will find out everything you need to know about lower back pain and the most effective ways to treat it, including an advanced treatment called Prolotherapy.

The treatment we offer at the clinic has been shown to reduce low back pain symptoms when all other treatments have failed. The following information will be covered in this article:

  • Symptoms of back conditions
  • Reasons why they can struggle to heal properly
  • Types of back conditions
  • Causes of back pain conditions
  • Research on prolotherapy for back pain

To show you the success that can be achieved with our treatment, here is a testimonial video of one of our patients:

You can find more video reviews on our review page.

Symptoms of low back pain

  • Pain – this can be sharp, dull or burning in nature.
  • Stiffness – a sensation of tightness and immobility.
  • Clicking in the lower back – this is a release of nitrogen gas bubbles from the joints between the vertabrea.
  • Weakness – you struggle to hold a good upright posture when sitting down, particularly towards the end of the day.
  • Instability – this can be as a result of either muscle, tendon or ligament weakness.

Woman in pain holding her low back before prolotherapy

Why do some low back conditions fail to heal properly with physiotherapy and exercises?

Many individuals will start off by going to see their local doctor and normally leave their office with some sort of painkiller or anti-inflammatory prescription. If that doesn’t help, then they end up trying one or more physical therapy discipines. These can include physiotherapy, osteopathy or chiropractic. If they fail to help, then you have to ask the question, what is stopping me from healing?

Some of the reasons are described below –

Ligament weakness: The role of a ligament is to stabilise our joints during movement. If weak, they can cause a joint to move at a range of motion that causes stress on the muscles around it.

How can this prevent me from healing? For example, you pull a muscle in your low back. For it to heal properly it needs to be resting and under as little strain as possible. If the ligaments adjacent to the pulled muscle are weak, then it creates a poor environment for the muscle to heal properly.

The injections help to toughen the fibres of ligaments, to improve the stability that they provide for an individuals back.

Age: As we age, the blood supply to our musculoskeletal system becomes less efficient. This means structures like muscles, tendons and ligaments struggle to recieve adequate levels of oxygen and nutrients to heal properly. The injections help to improve the blood supply to an injured area.

Misalignments: This can be both a direct cause of back pain and also a reason why a condition will struggle to heal with physical therapy.

The low back works in partnership with your hips, knees and ankles. A misalignment of these joints can affect your gait cycle, causing increased pressure and strain to go through your lower back. A common cause of misalignments in lower limb joints can be ligament weakness. As described above, our treatment can help to strengthen ligament fibres.

Before and after of a lady with a misaligned spine

Types of back injuries

Disc herniation – this is where the outer rings of a spinal disc becomes weak, and the small gel-like structure in the middle pushes out onto the weakened fibres. As a result, the adjacent nerve can become irritated.

Model of a herniated disc

Facet joint irritation – a facet joint is located between two vertebrae. Each has a small capsule around it that can become strained during certain movements.

Misalignment – this can occur at either the facet joints or the SI (sacroiliac) joints.

SI joint irritation – a poor walking gait or a misalignment of a facet joint can cause the SI joint to over-work and cause pain.

Causes

Trauma: The most common form of back trauma is from a lifting accident. It can be a result of either a poor lifting posture or the load being too heavy for the structures in the back to cope.

A car accident can cause pressure to go through the back. Both a head-on collision and a side shunt can cause the same level of damage.

Falls down the stairs or direct impacts during sporting activities such as rugby and american football can cause both damage and misalignments in the spine.

Our treatment can help back pain caused by trauma through proliferating the cells needed to heal at the site of the injury.

Poor Posture: It is often regarded as the most common cause of back pain. The 21st century postures we now adopt cause muscles, tendons and ligaments to function at an unnatural angle that eventually leads to pain. Pain as a result of poor posture is more common in individuals with weak ligaments and muscles.

Our treatment can help to strengthen the ligaments in the spine. Combining it with certain Pilates exercises can help to improve overall spinal posture.

A man at a desk with bad posture causing lower back pain

Misalignments: These can cause structures in the back to operate at angles that they weren’t designed to.

As discussed previously, trauma can cause a misalignment to occur in the spine. This can either be due to the accident itself or the limping postures people adopt to avoid pain.

Individuals diagnosed with hypermobility and conditions such as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome can often experience misalignments of the pelvis. As a result, the SI joints can become irritated.

Our treatment can help to reinforce the ligaments both in the spine and the pelvis, helping to provide a better foundation for the muscles function.

The following video testimonial is of a patient called Serena. She came to the clinic suffering from a lumbar disc herniation:

Prolotherapy research on low back pain

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15106234

https://journals.lww.com/ebp/Citation/2018/12000/Is_dextrose_prolotherapy_effective_at_reducing.45.aspx

Interested in finding out how much prolotherapy costs? Head over to our prices page.

To learn more about how prolotherapy works, head over to our page titled ‘prolotherapy.’

 

Inforgraphic describing how prolotherapy helps low back pain

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