The Back Story

By Meghan Rabbitt

A good friend of mine summed up back pain accurately and concisely: “I had it once and prayed to the heavens that it would never happen to me again.”
On my couch, flat on my back, ice pack covering my lower back, barely able to move without torment, I could relate.

My first bout of back pain came on so gradually that the eventual agony shocked me. I’d been cross-country skiing with a friend one Saturday morning and caught myself from taking a fall, jerking forward and back quickly to keep from tumbling down. I didn’t feel so much as a twinge when it happened—in fact, I kept skiing for a couple of hours. I do remember wanting to stretch my back before getting into the car to drive home—a simple precautionary move I thought would keep me from feeling stiff later on.

The stretching didn’t work. As the evening progressed, my back became stiff, stiff became painful, and painful took on new meaning when I woke up early the next morning in misery because I’d tried to roll over in bed. That bout of back pain would last a full week, keeping me more immobile than I’d ever been, and like my friend, I prayed it would pass as quickly as it had come on.

Sadly, my story of back pain is all too familiar. According to the Texas Back Institute, up to 85 percent of people will experience low-back pain at some point in their lives. The other statistics widely reported also bear repeating: Back pain is the second-leading reason Americans see a physician (upper-respiratory infections are first) and one of the most common reasons for work absences.

I was no exception to this last stat. After spending that post-skiing Sunday in bed, alternating between tears of pain and fear, Monday morning rolled around, and there was no way I could move enough to even get ready to go to my office, let alone sit there and actually accomplish anything. It took a full week—most of which I spent at home, flat on my couch or bed—before I felt some relief. But something good did come out of that debilitating episode: It launched my mission to discover the most effective ways to never experience back pain like that again.

What causes back pain?
My first appointment with a practitioner was with Larry Frieder, DC, a licensed chiropractor in Boulder, Colorado, where I live. To be honest, I’ve always been a little scared of chiropractors. But on day three of agony—when my fear that the pain would never go away had fully set in—I was willing to try anything. Frieder came highly recommended by a number of friends and acquaintances in town.

To ease my fears of the “cracking” I associated with chiropractic manipulations, Frieder explained to me the mechanics of back pain. In brief: The muscles surrounding the spine seize up to prevent the body from movement that will further harm the area (yet another example of Mother Nature’s genius). The body also sends chemicals and hormones to the injured area that cause swelling and inflammation. As for the cause of the muscle spasms? They could result from any number of issues, Frieder told me: a locked joint, a herniated disc, a strained muscle. But another potential cause he mentioned intrigued me more than the others: stress.

“Stress goes right to the body’s weakest spot,” Frieder said. “When we’re stressed, the parts of the body that are the most unbalanced, or weakest due to an old injury that has left resultant scar tissue, feel the effects.”

Fascinating. One month before my attack of back pain, I’d broken up with my boyfriend. I’d plowed through the loss—sad, of course, but chalking it up to being “for the best,” as the cliché goes. But in that moment, looking back, I realized how much underlying stress the loss of my relationship had triggered in me.

Toward the end of that week of pain, as the torture was finally letting up, I saw my acupuncturist, Mary Saunders, LAc, founder of Boulder Community Acupuncture. Before we got started, I ran Frieder’s stress theory by her. Not surprisingly, she wholeheartedly agreed.

“Stress can spark serious physical reactions in the body, particularly in women,” she said. “For example, when women are stressed, they’ll often complain about feeling tension in their back and shoulders. These muscles are typically more underdeveloped and weaker in women than in men, so we feel the effects of stress in those areas first.”

I lay on her table, and Saunders inserted tiny needles into acupuncture points on my wrists, legs, and feet that she told me would help block the pain signals to my brain and also bring more qi, or energy, to my aching lower back. Saunders encouraged the warm tears that started to flow down my face, telling me that “acupuncture works on deep levels to help release pent-up energy that hasn’t yet found its way out.” And so I let the tears come. And as I left her office, the release of that emotional stress brought a calmness and lightness to my body I hadn’t felt in weeks.


http://www.naturalsolutionsmag.com/articles-display/15514/keyword/the%20back%20story/The-Back-Story

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