Back Pain: What It Takes to End It for Good

From your own experience, you probably know that traditional therapies for back pain usually produce only short-term, partial relief or require regular — even lifelong — care. It need no longer be that way. You can end back pain for good and prevent flare-ups from occurring.

A new discipline in the field of health care: clinical somatic education, gets to the root of back pain and brings it under your own control. Most back pain sufferers who resort to clinical somatic education should expect full recovery in a space of days or weeks.

The 3 Biggest Mistakes Made by People
Trying to Get Out of Pain

What Clinical Somatic Education Does
Clinical somatic education retrains muscle/movement memory. Clients rapidly improve their muscular control and freedom of movement through a mind-brain-movement training process. Clinical somatic education affects the brain the way biofeedback does, but with importance differences, one being speed of results and the other being the durability of the improvement. Changes are usually definitive and need no further professional help.

Clinical somatic education recovers fitness for the activities of daily living.

A New Understanding of Back Pain
Spinal alignment and disc condition are secondary to something more basic: muscular tension — muscle/movement memory.

Muscular tensions pull on the bones (that’s their job) and in so doing, move the bones. That’s how spinal curvature changes with movement. Muscle/movement memory sets our posture and the alignment to which we return, at rest — that’s why spinal alignment changes and gets stuck in misalignment.

Tight back muscles get fatigued and sore; they get prone to spasm; they pull vertebrae together and compress discs, causing bulges and degeneration; they cause nerve entrapment, such as sciatica.

Back muscles are virtually never too weak; they feel weak because they’re tired from being tight all the time, musclebound. Spasm isn’t a sign of weakness, but a sign of hair-trigger readiness to contract — a completely different condition; weakness would be experienced as inability to do their job of keeping you upright.

Rest doesn’t help, much. Muscle memory, not disease or misalignment, keep them tight. Resting doesn’t change muscle memory. Muscle memory sets our postural and movement “set points”.

This statement applies as much to people with degenerative disc disease and herniated discs to those who have only a twinge, now and then. The underlying cause is the same: muscle tension.

“If that’s true,” you may ask, “why doesn’t my doctor (or therapist) know about it?”

The answer is that until recently, the connection between muscle memory and back pain wasn’t recognized. Effects are typically mistaken for causes. No method existed that could rapidly change muscle memory enough to be clinically practical. Word takes time to spread and gain credibility. People are attached to their methods and ideas.

You may think, “Back spasms are too painful, too serious to be dismissed that quickly, or that easily.”

That’s understandable — but a misunderstanding of your situation.

 

Get Free from That Back Pain
(self-relief program)
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Conventional Therapeutics and Back Muscle Spasms
Conventional treatment methods, as you already know, are not effective enough for most people. Most therapies try to strengthen, stretch, or adjust people out of back trouble by working on muscles or the skeletal system. But bones go where muscles pull them, the control center for the muscular system is the brain (not the therapist), and these approaches don’t address the brain’s control of muscle action, so the problem remains or returns. The problem isn’t in your muscles; it’s in your brain, the organ of learning and the seat of muscle/movement memory, which runs the show.

That’s why the relief obtained by conventional therapeutic approaches to back spasms is usually temporary and you remain subject to re-injury and to prescribed limitations to movement, such as “neutral spine position”.

Muscle/memory is acquired, learned. What’s learned can be unlearned, and actually, relearning muscular control is the only approach that works for long term relief of back pain. You must dissolve the memory-based, reflexive grip of musclebound back muscles; it can’t be manipulated away — at least, not for long.

Get Free from That Back Pain
(self-relief program)
To get a test-able preview of the new method referred to, here, click and send the email, blank. You will receive a quick-response message with the information.

Medical doctors, chiropractors, physical therapists, osteopaths, and bodyworkers use manipulative methods.

But problems arising from muscle/movement memory cannot be “cured” by manipulation because muscular tension is not a disease, but a habit maintained in the brain.

A Correct Understanding of ‘Strengthening and Stretching’
The idea behind the common “strengthening and stretching” regimen for back spasms is usually based on a misunderstanding; it’s a misunderstanding because the muscles involved are almost never weak, but tired; it’s a misunderstanding because the muscles involved are not “short” and in need of stretching, but “in contraction” and in need of relaxation. Sore muscles don’t need strengthening; they need relaxation and a chance to be refreshed, again.

You need to regain your ability to relax, something you can’t regain by being manipulated by someone else; you regain it by relearning to relax — a form of learning, albeit a specialized one for which you will probably need training.

Back Muscle Spasms May be Painful, but Not Themselves an Injury involving any Damage to Spine or Discs
One of the automatic reactions of the body to injury is to tighten up. That’s part of the pain of most injuries, particularly of musculo-skeletal injuries. It’s a reaction that protects the body from further injury. There are cases where the tightening up of back muscles is such a protective reaction, and a necessary one — where actual damage has occurred, such as a ruptured disc or a violent accident. In such situations, surgery may be necessary and changing muscle memory will either not help or produce only temporary relief, at least until after surgery, unhappy news for some, but realistic.

If you’ve seen a doctor for your back spasms, he or she has either discovered that you need surgery or that you don’t. Surgery is a last, desperate resort and most doctors are reluctant to recommend it. If you have been sent for therapy or given drugs, yours is not a surgical situation, meaning that your spasms are not a protective reaction against injury, but chronic activity.

In the majority of back spasms, there is no injury. The back spasms are just a movement malfunction — a tension habit formed under stress. It’s the “tension” part of “nervous tension.”

So, why do back spasms occur? You now have part of the answer. Let’s look a little more closely.

Your muscles obey your brain. Except for momentary reflexes controlled in the spinal cord (tested by your doctor’s hammer tap), that’s the whole story. So, if you have tight, spastic muscles, they’re caused by your brain.

This answer is a “good news/bad news” type of answer. The bad news is that your muscles are out of control, and it’s your brain’s fault! Your brain isn’t broken, just trapped by the memory of stress or injury in your history. The good news is that your brain can be relearn to relax those muscles.

Where do Back Muscle Spasms Come from?

One thing you will almost always notice about people with back spasms, if you exercise your powers of observation, is their high shoulders and swayback. Touch the muscles of their lower back, and you will find the same thing: hard, contracted muscles, not soft, weak, flabby muscles.

The major source of back spasms is the lifestyle of being “on the go” — driven, driving, productive, on time, and responsive to every situation. Tense. This is a new idea for most people, so here’s the explanation.

Our post-modern lifestyle triggers an ancient neuromuscular (bodily) response (known to developmental physiologists as the Landau Reaction); this reaction involves a tightening of the muscles of the spine in preparation for arising from rest (sitting or lying down) into activity (sitting, standing, walking, running). The Landau Reaction consists of the muscular responses involved in coming to a heightened state of alertness in preparation for moving into action. The reaction may be mild, moderate, strong, or extreme; triggered incessantly for years, a muscle/movement memory forms — one that often outlasts the moment (or stage of life) when it was necessary and makes you vulnerable to episodes of spasm.


Many Back Pain Issues Come from the Same Cause

Though injuries from traffic accidents, falls, etc., also trigger muscular reactions that can become habitual, the Landau Reaction is behind most of the back-spasm epidemic in our society. It’s a consequence of accumulated stress.

While you can’t avoid the Landau Reaction (it’s a necessary and appropriate part of life), you can avoid getting stuck in it. If your lifestyle puts you habitually in a state of reaction, you have to “de-habituate” yourself from it, so that your rise in tension occurs only as a momentary response to situations and does not become your chronic state.

Attempts to Break a Back Muscle Tension Habit

 


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Cures for include relaxation techniques, hypnosis, massage, skeletal adjustments, electrical stimulation, muscle relaxant drugs, and at last (as at first) pain medications.

Until recently, there was nothing better. Now, an effective way exists to rapidly improve muscular control, freedom of movement, and physical comfort. Once you have gained control of your Landau Reaction, a brief daily regimen of certain movements is sufficient to keep you from accumulating the daily tensions of a driven and overloaded life. You can keep refreshing yourself, as needed.

If you have numbness or tingling in your extremities, your problem is more severe and requires a medical evaluation to rule out serious conditions. Even if you have surgery, you will still need to learn to relax the tight muscles that initially caused the problem. If yours is not a surgical situation, then somatic education is probably viable for you.

The new methods used to de-habituate Landau Reaction are highly reliable and have no adverse side effects, apart from occasional temporary soreness the day after a session, soreness that fades out in a day or two, leaving you flexible, comfortable and stronger than before.

MORE:
How to Self-Relieve Low Back Pain (article)
Somatic Exercise for Chronic Low Back Pain (explanation) 

 

 

 

 

 

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Back Spasms — The Inside Story

Back spasms catch us unawares


          so to speak.

But here’s the odd thing:  when a back spasm happens, it’s most often been coming for a long time.

The Back Story of Most Back Pain

Back during a period of prolonged high stress — maybe during an employment crisis or facing deadline after deadline after deadline — you got yourself used to driving yourself hard or used to being in a state of urgency.  Maybe you listen to too much news or talk radio and get “wound up”.  Maybe you stayed too long in a situation you really wanted to get out of, or maybe you put and kept yourself in uncomfortable positions, by sense of necessity, that you would rather have gotten out of, and got part-way used to that, while keeping going.  Or maybe you just “trained” badly or trained on top of old injuries.  You’re musclebound, whatever the story, with a spasm in your back.

It’s been coming for a long time, your back spasm — you’ve been getting closer to the edge of cramp or spasm for a long time.  You got so used to being tense and stiff that, one day, you pulled on that tenseness and stiffness and it pulled you right back, something like an internally generated whiplash action. 

What If It Was a Whiplash Incident?

Maybe you were involved in an accident that yanked or jerked or jolted you a bit too much.

Then, you tightened up suddenly, got prone to sudden yank-back, and you knew you were caught — even if, at first, you didn’t realize it was a protective spasm you were feeling.

A Back Spasm Shows Brain-Muscle Conditioning

Caught in your own conditioning– think about that.  Your spasm is your conditioning.

We all caught in our conditioning, to varying degrees and in different ways.  Had you thought of it like that, before?

However, sometimes, it’s “just enough” (too much), and with just one more challenge we suddenly go hard-line, uptight, tense, caught in the grip of our own conditioning, in spasm, body and mind (two aspects of the same thing).  Think about it:  didn’t your back spasm stop you in your tracks? mid-step?  It wasn’t “a back spasm“; it was a “you spasm“.

The Problem with a “You Spasm”

Not enough reserve capacity, not enough tolerance for additional demand.  On edge, trying to be nice, perhaps.  Not much more capacity for stress, however.  Used up, or close to it, in the grip.

The solution?

Recover much of that reserve capacity by dispeling obsolete tension patterns.  Lose the excess tension.  Get back to normal.  Recover your reserve capacity.  Feel like a human being.  You may have forgotten what that feels like and you may not have known that you can do it, yourself.


Common Back Spasms are Simple

“Simple When You Know How”

Common Back Pain is a fairly simple condition to master.  It’s just a primitive “go” reaction (“Landau Reaction“) turned on too hard and too long.  You’re overheated; you’re idling too high.  You can learn to turn this reflex (Landau Reaction) down and up again, temper it, recover a bunch of reserve capacity, flexibility and freedom of movement.  No more spasm, no more back pain, more reserve capacity, more movability.

Back Spasms from Injury are More Complex, May Take More Doing to Clear Up

Back pain from injury may consist of a number of overlying contraction patterns.  However, bending over or twisting and getting a spasm isn’t an injury; it’s a malfunction that falls under “Common Back Pain”.  Recovering from a complicated injury isn’t more difficult, particularly; it just takes more steps, some sorting out, and more doing, of course.

The same principle applies, either way.

Recover voluntary (deliberate) control of the muscular grip and let it relax, then deliberately use it freely and so reclaim it.  Strength, reserve capacity, free control.  Security.

One Right Reason

That’s one very good purpose of somatic education — to get people out of pain.  It’s effective, it’s faster than more well-known or popularized methods, and it brings durable benefits under all life conditions.

Different — and More Like Yourself

A larger effect of somatic education is to train people to free themselves from the excessive grip of their conditioning; to re-acquaint people with what it feels like to feel fine;  so people feel different and more like themselves.

Relief comes primarily from what the person does, secondarily from what someone else did with the person.  If you do sessions of this process, you contribute at least 50% to the change, moving between effort and non-effort (in clinical sessions), or more like 90% if you’re working at a distance from me (Lawrence Gold) following recorded instructional material and taking distance-coaching, as needed.

Because the person is contributing energy, intention, and intelligence to the process, and because they’re changing from within (if guided from out), the change is theirs — theirs to maintain or theirs to re-create, if necessary.  More than that, it’s faster than by externally operating methods, whether scalpel, laser, or stretching device (“spinal decompression”), longer-lasting than manipulations or interventions of many kinds.  It’s longer-lasting because it covers more of the bases and from the internal control center, the self, oneself, and faster because it works from the inside, out.

MORE ON BACK PAIN, DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES

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EMERGENCY BACK SELF-CARE | FIRST AID FOR BACK PAIN | SOMATICS.COM

If you have back pain, then the first thing to consider is that you don’t “have” back pain; back pain “has you” in its grip. That way of describing it would seem to be more true to your experience, wouldn’t it? This video, below, shows how you can get control of the back pain that has you in its grip and then get rid of it, while recovering the comfortable and secure use of your back.

Although some people believe that standard procedures are “time-tested” and inherently more reliable, in this case, the opposite is true. Faster, more complete, and longer-lasting relief can be obtained with a less invasive, “high-touch” procedure that hits “the mark” than by standard procedures that miss “the mark”. What is “the mark”? What to do, right now

This video shows what you can do to relieve your own back pain and restore freedom of movement. The procedure has helped thousands of people who have already had back surgery or other invasive procedures.

For a clear understanding of a new, more effective approach to back pain than stretching, strengthening, adjustments or massage, please see this page.

For chronic back pain, please see this page, which also contrasts conventional back pain methods (including spinal decompression devices) with an entirely new, more effective approach.

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Spinal Decompression Therapy and Back Pain

The mystique of technology as a fix for everything extends to back pain — in particular, as spinal decompression therapy, an offering that has gained visibility as among the latest in spine care (along with laser treatment — this article applies to that approach, too).

The method involves a mechanical device intended to separate vertebrae and thereby to relieve pain.

This approach is a higher-technology variation on a simpler method, inversion therapy, which involves a kind of treatment table that, by anchoring the user’s ankles and turning upside down, uses gravity to separate vertebrae.

Both methods are variations on traction, again, using mechanical force to separate vertebrae.

The premise of all three methods, spinal decompression therapy, inversion therapy, and traction, is that vertebrae are too close together and need separation.

That premise is good as far as it goes — but let’s look deeper. Why do vertebrae get too close together?

Understand that vertebrae are linked together not only by discs and ligaments, but by muscles that control spinal alignment. When those muscles tighten, vertebral alignment changes; twists, curvature changes, and compression of neighboring vertebrae result. Muscles pull vertebrae closer together; the discs push the vertebrae apart.

Muscle tightness of this sort is supposed to be intermittent and temporary, as required by the demands of movement and lifting; muscles are supposed to relax (decrease their resting tone) when these demands end. However, when, for reasons related to injury and stress, this tightness becomes habituated (i.e., quasi-permanent), problems (i.e., back pain) result: nerve root compression, bulging discs, facet joint irritation, and muscle fatigue (soreness) and spasm.

This habituation is a muscular behavior (postural reflex pattern) learned by and stored in the brain, the master control center for all muscles. Learning is a matter of memory; when either prolonged nervous tension, repetitive movements, or violent injury occur, the memory of these influences displaces the memory of free movement and habituation results; people forget what free movement feels like and forget how to move freely. They fall into the grip of the memory of tension.

Muscles obey the nervous system, with all but the most primitive reflexes stored in the brain as learned action patterns that control all movement. There is no muscle memory other than what is stored in the brain; muscle memory is brain memory.

Knowing that, consider approaches that mechanically stretch muscles or pull vertebrae apart. What do they do to habituated muscular behavior? to the memory of tension? The answer: they temporarily induce muscular relaxation but do not restore the memory of normal tension and movement, which is acquired “learn-by-doing.” We are genetically designed to return to our familiar movement patterns once outside influences end; we return to our memory of how we have learned to move and hold ourselves. Shortly after the end of therapy, our familiar movement behavior and muscular tensions come back because you can’t change learned reflex patterns stored in the brain by stretching muscles; you can only retrain those reflex patterns by new learning of movement. If you want a lasting change, that’s what you have to do.

So, the typical experience of relief after manipulative therapies lasts hours or days.

For some people, whose habituation is not that deeply entrenched, manipulative methods are sufficient; you know for yourself whether this is true of your experience; now you know why.

Here’s a question: How could you relearn free movement?

The answer has two steps:
(1) Unlearn the habituated pattern of muscular tension.
(2) Relearn free movement.

The process involves recovering the ability to feel in control of the involved musculature in movement; it’s a learn-by-doing process, not a mental process, only, but a process that involves both mind and body.

Wouldn’t you prefer to be free of repetitive therapy? to be free of dependency upon a therapist and the involved expense? to be able to care for your own back? to be free and safe to do any activity you wish?

Those are good reasons to make note of the approach described, here (bookmark this page): getting back control of your own muscular tension.

Free yourself from the grip of the memory of injuries, stress, and repetitive movement, not merely at the mental level, but also at the bodily level.

Visit this page for a more complete explanation of back pain and therapy.

FIRST AID FOR BACK PAIN

For chronic back pain, please see this page, which also contrasts conventional back pain methods (including spinal decompression devices) with an entirely new, more effective approach.

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