I want to take a few minutes to talk about back pain with you, because chances are if you're watching this video, it's because you are hunting for a solution.
You're wanting to know how long do I have to keep putting up with this? It's been years or it's been months or maybe it's just been a few days. You're trying to figure out maybe why do I have this back pain in the first place? How can I get rid of it because it's getting in the way of everything that I want to do. I can't walk and exercise. I can't run. I have problems sitting for too long. I have problems standing for too long. I may be getting some sciatica down my leg. I may be feeling some numbness or some tingling. Back pain can manifest itself in so many different ways and there's not necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach to helping it feel better.
But let's back up a little bit. I would anticipate that if you are on the hunt for a solution, you've probably already seen your doctor and he or she may have said, here take these pills. Those pills may be an anti-inflammatory. They may just be a pain pill and chances are they work for a little while. But they don't necessarily take all the pain away. Or you've been dependent on them for a very long period of time and you're getting tired of it? Maybe it's chewing up your insides, meaning the lining of your intestines is starting to get really irritated, which can cause some other problems.
You may have been told that well it’s your age, you're old, that's why you have back pain or it's your weight or it's your job or it's wear and tear. I mean there are many different reasons why we may be told that we have pain. Especially when you are told that you may just have to live with it. Well, I just don't think that that's wise advice. I'm sorry that you had to hear that because it just takes away your sense of empowerment, your confidence in being able to actually manage your own body and to feel like you are in control of your destiny, when it comes to the back pain you may be feeling, the sciatica, you may be feeling and how it gets in the way.
Your usual day to day activities. So, like I was saying it comes in many different shapes and forms and feelings. Some people have a very low ache or a rumble or a tingle. Some it's there all the time and some it happens when you do a certain motion could be just bending over to tie your shoe or standing up from bed first thing in the morning. Or maybe, if you lie on your right side, you feel fine, but as soon as you turn over onto your left side, it really starts to hurt. You can feel it down in the lower part of your back.
You can feel it broadly across the back. Maybe on one side or the other, you may feel it down into the pelvis or the buttocks. It may radiate into your hip or to your groin and it may be position dependent or activity dependent, and you may try a few things. You may have tried to stretch it out. You may have tried some exercises that a friend said were the right things to do. You may have gone to see a chiropractor or a massage therapist and it felt good for a little bit, but it didn't quite solve the problem. So, you find yourself having to go back over and over again and that money that you're spending on that is adding up.
The thing about treating and fixing and alleviating back pain, is that there's no one-size-fits-all approach. You don't have a very specific type of spinal manipulation, get a clunk or a pop and feel good for a long term. You don't do a specific set of exercises and feel better for the long term. It's a very individualized approach, and so, if you've ever been to the doctor or spoken with one of your friends or looking on YouTube and were given a list of exercises that somebody swore were the answer and they weren't, can be really frustrating. The idea then is to really get to the bottom of why you are hurting.
So that way, you can get you off the pain pills, keep you out of the doctor's office, avoid any potential for injections and be able to do what you want and love and need to be able to do. If you're a hiker, maybe you're a runner. Maybe you sit in your car all day because you drive for a living or you are helping a loved one, who's gotten home from the hospital or maybe your job is you’re a health care worker and you're helping people day to day, and you need to be able to bend over for an extended period of time or stand up or sit down or squat, and it's your pain.
Your discomfort is getting in the way of that and you're having try and make incremental and small adjustments to get around it. But it's just not working, and it seems to be getting worse. Physical therapy comes in and helps you find that solution. So, when you come into my office, you speak with me doctor physical therapy, and what we end up doing is, for the first part of that initial evaluation, we actually interview. We talk to each other. So that way, I can get a very good sense as to how you hurt, why you hurt how long you've been hurting, what you've tried, what worked, what didn't, what you think actually caused it in the first place, what some potential other causes could be. We take a systems approach, a whole-body holistic approach.
What else is going on in your life? How's your family situation? How is your medication situation? There are many different things which can cause or can prolong back pain and discomfort, and we want to have a really good sense as to what may be a causative factor. What may be contributing, and so once we have a sense of you, then the majority of what I need to see is complete, because I'm already on a track with a very thorough understanding of where we need to go, to help you feel better and move better without pain pills without more trips to the doctor's office, and that way you can get back to doing what you need to want to do.
We're gonna spend the rest of the initial evaluation actually, looking at your joint flexibility, your muscle, flexibility. I want to see how well your neurological system is working in regard to how well you stay on your feet or how well you can change positions and how smooth it all is. That way, when it comes time to design your program for the long term, we know that the duration of your program is going to be guided in a very specific manner, based on what we see on that first day and then how we re-evaluate on it visit by visit basis.
You're gonna have some very specific exercises that are created based on what we find is happening with you. Not out of a generic list that we pull from a drop-down menu, but actually exercises and activities that are specific to what your body needs. You've probably had x-rays. You've probably had MRIs, and if you haven't, you can certainly get them, but they aren't necessarily going to be the one piece of information where we go aha. Here is the problem.
It's rare that we actually have an x-ray or an MRI serve as a smoking gun if you will, but actually what they do is they just bring a little bit more data, a little more information to the decision-making process and we correlate or we compare the results to actually what we're seeing in real life in real time. And it's rare that we're actually going to treat toward that x-ray or treat toward that MRI.
Because if you hurt, and you have specific findings like you, have a degenerative disc or you have a herniated disc or maybe you have signs of arthritis, the thing worth knowing that you may not know about is that, a fair majority of people who get those same X-Rays and MRIs who have no pain symptoms, have the exact same signs on their MRI and their x-ray. So, we can't put a ton of faith in those images to say aha, here's the problem but, like I said we can compare and say, is what we see in the image. Actually look like it is related to your pain symptoms.
But in the end, it's not going to really change the way that we treat the direction that we go, because you are not your image and everybody's insides look a little different, but they all share commonalities. We're standing on our feet and we're doing activity for the duration of our life. We are going to use and utilize the tissues in our body and they're going to constantly be regenerating themselves and constantly healing. We take advantage of the body's ability to heal and we put it to work by doing these very specific exercises. Just like we get gray hairs as we age, we also have the gray hairs of the inside of the body.
Those are some of the things that you see on those x-rays and the MRIs, which is again why we look at it and we absorb that information that we get. But it doesn't tell us exactly what is going on and the reason why you hurt or the reason why something something is actually happening and getting in the way of you doing what you want to do. That comes in the personalization that you get with your initial evaluation. I hope this brings to light some idea as to what back pain is why it may be happening and how you can actually go about solving it by taking a systems wide or a holistic approach from top to bottom understanding that the back doesn't work alone, it works with the hips.
It works with upper back, the neck, the shoulder your internal organs to actually create you, the whole picture, and it's you that we're going to take into account when we create and design the personalized system. That's going to help you feel better with the less pain pills. Less trips to the doctor, less chance or need for injection, so you can get back to doing what you need and want to be able to do.