Category: severe back pain

Posted on

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)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.

 





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

 


To get a preview of the new method referred to, here, click and send the email window that opens, blank.

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) 

 

 

 

 

 

Add your comment — what you would like to ask or tell.
Posted on

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.

Web Directory

Add your comment — what you would like to ask or tell.
Posted on

Therapeutics and Somatics

This entry contrasts standard therapeutics for pain with clinical somatic education, for relief of pain. It explains the origins of pain and how therapeutic approaches work (or don’t work).

To begin, I’ll state my bias: I am a clinical somatic educator trained in methods of mind-brain-body training that addresses chronic, non-malignant, musculo-skeletal pain (e.g., back pain) and stress-related disorders (breathing difficulty, headaches).

When pain from injuries lingers beyond the expected few weeks of tissue healing, it generally comes from residual muscular tension triggered by the injury. Tight muscles cause muscle pain, joint compression (leading to osteoarthritis) and nerve impingement (e.g., sciatica, Thoracic Outlet Syndrome).

Conventional therapeutics and alternative therapies (e.g., bodywork of all kinds) generally produce temporary and partial relief from moderate-to-severe injuries and may be slow to produce durable improvements.

Clinical somatic education, in the tradition of Thomas Hanna, generally produces rapid, durable, and complete relief from moderate-to-severe injuries. That distinction makes it a better choice, in general, than both conventional and other manipulative therapies.

This article contrasts those methods to an approach that deals with many musculo-skeletal problems, including back pain, more effectively.

Click above for the self-relief program for back pain and for other conditions.

How Chronic Muscular Tension Forms

In the viewpoint of somatic education, muscular activity comes either from voluntary behavior, from habitual (involuntary) learned behavior, or from involuntary reflexes. That means that movement, posture, and muscular tension come conditioning of our nervous system.

It seems obvious that stress and trauma leave impressions in memory and that those impressions might be associated with tension of one sort or another. The piece I’m adding, here, is that the memory of injury, if intense enough, can displace the familiar, healthy awareness of movement, position and self-control. That displacement creates a kind of amnesia of the body; we forget how we were before injury and get trapped in tension.

It’s this kind of tension that conventional medicine tries to “cure” by means of manipulative therapeutics (including chiropractic, bodywork and acupuncture), drugs, and surgery.

That this approach works better than the methods this article critiques remains for you, the reader, to see for yourself. I can’t convince you, here (any more than I could be convinced before seeing for myself), but can only offer you a line of reasoning and … at the bottom of this page, a bit of evidence — a link to a candid, two-minute video clip that shows the first moments of a client after a one-hour session of clinical somatic education.

So, I must appeal to your capacity to reason and to your intelligence and you must seek out the experience, for yourself.

We begin.

OVERVIEW OF THERAPEUTIC MODALITIES FOR BACK PAIN

First, I’ll comment on drugs, then manipulative techniques in general, then surgery, then clinical somatic education.

Two of these three approaches, drugs and manipulation, are best for temporary relief or for relief of new or momentary muscle spasms (cramp), not for long-term or severe problems.

The third, surgery, is a last resort and is appropriate for only the most severe of degenerative conditions beyond the reach of therapy.

You can get a comparison chart of common modalities here.

DRUGS

Drugs can provide temporary relief or for relief of new or momentary muscle spasms (cramp), but can’t provide a satisfactory solution for long-term or severe problems. They generally consist of muscle relaxants, anti-inflammatories, and analgesics (pain meds).

Muscle relaxants have the side-effect of inducing stupor, as you have found if you’ve used them; they’re a temporary measure because as soon as one discontinues use, muscular contractions return.

Anti-inflammatories (such as cortisone or “NSAIDS” – non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) reduce pain, swelling and redness, and they have their proper applications (tissue damage). Cortizone, in particular, has a side effect of breaking down collagen (of which all tissues of the body are made). When pain results from muscular contractions (muscle fatigue/soreness) or nerve impingement (generally caused by muscular contractions), anti-inflammatories are the wrong approach because these conditions are not cases of tissue damage. Nonetheless, people confuse pain with inflammation, or assume that if there’s pain, there’s inflammation or tissue damage, and use anti-inflammatories to combat the wrong problem.

Analgesics tend to be inadequate to relieve back pain or the pain of trapped nerves and, in any case, only hide that something is going on, something that needs correction to avoid more serious spine damage.

MANIPULATIVE TECHNIQUES

Manipulative techniques consist of chiropractic, massage, stretching and strengthening (which includes most yoga and Pilates), most physical therapy, inversion, and other forms of traction such as DRS Spine Decompression.

Most back pain consists of muscular contractions maintained reflexively by the brain, the master control center for muscular activity and movement (except for momentary reflexes like the stretch reflex or Golgi Tendon Organ inhibitory response, which are spinal reflexes). I put the last comment in for people who are more technically versed in these matters; if these terms are unfamiliar to you, don’t worry. My point is that manipulative techniques can be only temporarily effective (as you have probably already found) because they don’t change muscular function at the level of brain conditioning, which controls tension and movement, and which causes the back muscle spasms.

Nonetheless, people commonly resort to manipulative techniques because it’s what they know — and manipulation is the most common approach, other than muscle relaxant drugs or analgesics, to pain of muscular origin.

SURGERY

Surgery includes laminectomy, discectomy, implantation of Harrington Rods, and surgical spine stabilization (spinal fusion).

Surgery is the resort of the desperate, although surgery has a poor track record for back pain.

There are situations where surgery is necessary and appropriate — torn or ruptured discs, fractures, spinal stenosis, rare cases of congenital scoliosis. There are situations where surgery is inappropriate — bulging discs, undiagnosable pain, muscular nerve impingement.

Severity of pain is not the proper criterion for determining which approach to take. The proper criterion is recognition of the underlying cause of the problem and dealing with that.

A NON-MANIPULATION APPROACH THAT FREQUENTLY GETS RESULTS WHEN THERAPY HAS FAILED: CLINICAL SOMATIC EDUCATION
Working with Brain-Level Control

Most back disorders are conditioning problems – correctable by clinical somatic education.

Clinical somatic education is not about convincing people that ‘things are not so bad, and live with it’ or ‘understanding their condition better’ or instructions for maintaining good posture. It’s a procedure to eliminate the underlying cause of pain symptoms and to improve function.

In the case of back pain, the underlying cause — chronic back tension — causes muscular pain (fatigue), disc compression, nerve root compression, facet joint irritation, and the catch-all term, arthritis — all through strictly mechanical means.

Degenerative Disc Disease, for example, though called a disease, is no more a disease of the discs than is excessive wear of tires on an overloaded vehicle with wheels out of alignment. Over a long period of time, accelerated wear accumulates. With discs, they call that a disease. There is no such thing as Degenerative Disc “Disease”; it’s breakdown caused by bad conditioning.

Clinical Somatic Education

Clinical somatic education is a discipline distinct from osteopathy, physical therapy, chiropractic, massage therapy, and other similar modalities.

It isn’t a “brand” of therapy or treatment, but a category or discipline within which various somatic “brands” or approaches exist. Examples of “brands” include Trager Psychophysical Integration, Aston Patterning, Rolfing Movement, Orthobionomy, Somatic Experiencing, The Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Functional Integration, Hanna Somatic Education and others.

The prime approach of somatic education, through whatever method or “school”, is to retrain the nervous system to free muscles from an excessively contracted state and to enhance control of movement, function, and physical comfort.

One key difference of clinical somatic education from manipulative practices is the active participation in learning by the client. It’s not just strengthening or stretching, but gaining the ability to relax completely, to exercise full strength, and control of every strength level in between. The added freedom and control that a client learns during sessions, and not what a practitioner does to the client, per se, causes the improvements. In clinical somatic education, the instruction comes from outside; the improvement comes from within.

As education, clinical somatic education deals with memory patterns — the memories of incidents of injury, of stressful situations and of how to move and how to relax. Memory patterns show up as habitual muscular tension and changes of movement (e.g., limping) and posture (e.g., uneven hips or shoulders).

Deeper-acting somatic disciplines, such as Feldenkrais Functional Integration and Hanna somatic education, deal with more deeply ingrained and unconscious habit patterns formed by injuries and stress.

How it Works

Clinical somatic education uses movement and positioning to enable the client, by combining sensation and improving control of movement, to recapture control of out-of-control muscles. As muscles come under voluntary control, they relax and become responsive, again.

The Distinction: Clinical vs. Enriching Somatic Education

Most forms of somatic education are not “clinical” somatic education; they are “enriching” somatic education that gradually improves movement and sensory awareness. They have limited predictability about when a specific outcome, such as pain-free movement, will occur.

The distinction of a clinical approach to somatic education is the speed with which improvements occur and the ability of its practitioners to predict with a high degree of reliability how many sessions will be required to resolve a specific malady, without further need for medication or treatment by a health professional — “how long before I can have my lifestyle back”.

Even “enriching” somatic education (such as Feldenkrais Somatic Integration or Aston Patterning) alleviates pain, given enough time — even where more conventional therapeutic methods — manipulation, adjustments, stretching, strengthening, drugs, acupuncture, surgery — are less successful or fail altogether.

The specific advantage seen in clinical somatic education by referring physicians is that clinical somatic education, while being effective in the relief of muscular pain and spasticity, has the specific virtue of teaching the client an ability to improve control the muscular complaint (i.e., pain) to the point that there is little chance of a future return of the problem.

For a technical comparison between somatic education and chiropractic (as an example of a manipulative approach), you may click here

For a discussion of back pain and clinical somatic education, you may click here. For a discussion of clinical somatic education and recovery from injury, in general, you may click here.

a candid, two minute video of a back pain client’s first moments after completing a one-hour session of clinical somatic education

Click above for the self-relief program for back pain and for other conditions.

Add your comment — what you would like to ask or tell.