Roughly 80% of Americans will suffer from back pain at some point in their lives. It's an enormous problem, and it's most often caused by mechanical or structural problems in the muscles, ligaments, tendons, joints and discs of the spine.
The questions worth asking
Most of us learned early in life that you treat a problem by going to the hospital or taking a pill. Sometimes that's exactly right. With mechanical back pain, it's worth asking:
- Do the pills fix the cause of the back pain, or just quiet the signal?
- Do they prevent the long-term degeneration that follows years of poor mechanics?
- Who on my care team actually has specialized training in spinal biomechanics?
What's usually going on
Back pain rarely starts the day it hurts. Most cases are the product of years of accumulated load: a disc that has slowly lost height and hydration, facet joints taking over work the disc used to do, a deep stabilizer group that stopped firing after an old injury, and a hip that never regained full mobility.
That's why the moment of onset is so often trivial: bending to pick up a piece of paper. The paper wasn't the cause. It was the last straw.
How we treat it
At Toledo Health and Wellness Institute we take an integrative approach, bringing the best of medical and alternative treatments together in one location:
- Assessment and imaging to identify the structure at fault
- Spinal decompression where disc involvement is confirmed
- Targeted injections when inflammation needs to be controlled to allow rehabilitation
- Physiotherapy and rehabilitation to restore the strength and mobility that keep it from returning
- Manual therapy and soft-tissue work to address compensations
Symptoms we help with
We're seeing excellent results with patients who struggle with:
- Difficulty sitting for any length of time
- Sharp, catching pain with movement
- Difficulty walking or standing upright
- Pain radiating into the buttock or leg
- Morning stiffness that takes an hour to loosen
If any of that sounds like your week, schedule a consultation and let's find out what's actually driving it.