Aother way around pain

Low back pain is high on the list of reasons people go to the doctor. If you figure the price of disability, time off and other related expenses, it costs about $100 billion in the United States every year.
Add in the cost associated with all the other types of pains — headaches, misery that accompanies some cancers, the post-surgery pain that won't leave — and it's daunting, says Dr. Christopher Caldwell, who completed an Anesthesia Pain Medicine Fellowship and is board-certified in neuromusculoskeletal medicine and osteopathic manipulative medicine.

One of the challenges with treating low back pain is that so many different things may cause it. It can result from arthritis or muscle pain, for instance.
Pain often comes in layers. "There's almost never a single cause with a simple solution," Caldwell says, so it "requires a willingness to look for and find all the different contributing factors, and then we must try to address each of them appropriately."
Some doctors simply don't have the time or the expertise to peel away the layers.
"We need to do better," Caldwell says.
Several classes of medications help treat pain, and which one is used depends on where the pain is, what's causing it and what's keeping it alive. While most people think first of strong opioid medications, they offer only limited benefits for chronic pain. It's much better for acute, short-term pain such as a broken arm or after surgery.
Medications that work on nerves make them less likely to send a pain message to the brain, often used to treat neuropathic pain. Pain itself can change how the body signals, which is why pain sometimes persists when the root cause is gone.
Anti-inflammatory medications are often helpful. So are exercise and osteopathic manipulative treatment. There are a dozen different procedures that can be done under X-ray guidance to apply medication or technology in the body, including placing steroids deep in the lower back by the spinal cord. Radiofrequency neuroablation, spinal cord stimulators and nerve blocks are part of the arsenal.
Backs don't get better without physical rehabilitation, "with enough (pain) relief to accomplish it. There's no way through it other than through it," Caldwell says, so patients must be willing to do their part.

If you're looking for another way around the pain response, please check out our Relexive De-Afferentation Techniques (RDTs).

We have left contact numbers and email addresses for our senior therapists and those who have trained with us at this site: http://www.manualmedicine.bravehost.com/

Stay well!

With thanks to: http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,640193153,00.html