Back Pain Treatments

Back pain causes happens to be one of the top search strings that people search on Google with. In fact, it wouldn't be much surprise if there were as many doctors on Google searching as patients.

The thing is, even if 80% of America suffers from back pain at some point, and osteopaths conscientiously investigate it with all their high-tech wizardry, most of the time, there is no cause found. No one knows what causes it.

Lose Your Back Pain

This situation places doctors and patients in a rather interesting situation: they have no real way of evaluating the new back pain treatments that researchers come up with all the time.

Just about every drug-based, surgery-based or therapy-based treatment that researchers come up with has its legitimacy challenged by critics; there are basically no back pain treatments out there that are reasonably well-accepted by the medical community.

For all the trouble that the medical community goes to, inventing, trying out and defending back pain treatments, it appears that the only dependable way to go about helping your back problem is usually the old-fashioned one – allowing it to take care of itself while you do what you can to improve your posture and develop a reasonably healthy lifestyle.

Perhaps the reason back pain is such a problematic condition is that it tends to be not one condition at all. There are literally dozens of health issues – that have nothing to do with one another – that can all result in the same kind of back pain, more or less.

Back pain isn't one disease. It's about time doctors accepted that there is precious little they can do to intervene; and that patients knew about this.

Visit your osteopath’s office for back pain, and nine times out of ten, they just don't find a cause. Not even when they put you under the MRI.

But they don't know what to do when they look at the results. Not even if they find abnormalities. Doctors routinely find lots of abnormalities in the spine and back in people who don't they ever have any pain.

Doctors don't really know which abnormalities cause pain and which don't. So what exactly are you supposed to do if you suffer from back pain? Are you supposed to just wait? Take a few pain killers?

OxyContin, a painkiller that is used by millions of Americans, can be very, very effective. But it's a narcotic that's known to be addictive. But if addiction is a bad thing, pain that doesn't go away for weeks on end can be terrible too.

NSAIDS like Vioxx aren’t sold anymore because they are supposed to cause heart attacks. Even ibuprofen or aspirin, if you take them often enough, are known to cause internal bleeding. What on earth are you supposed to do? Steroidal spinal injections don't help for more than a little while.

Doctors are at their wits’ end. Some of them prescribe Cymbalta and Lyrica for off-label use and hope that they will help. Often, they just recommend something drastic – like surgery where the surgeon removes a few damaged spinal discs and vertebrate. This can certainly help with the pain.

But it can have other serious consequences too. There are nearly half a million Americans every year who get this done. About 10% of them get infections and further complications.

Basically, doctors are going back to a long-term physiotherapy, hoping to help patients learn new ways of using their bodies. Back pain treatments have come full circle.