Ease the pain in your back or further down

Do you have pain in back, butt or legs? You’re not alone! Experts estimate that 80 percent of all of us will experience back pain sometime in our lives. We Americans spend $50 billion a year trying to relieve it, usually without positive results.

If your back pain is caused by an injury, you have a variety of treatment options, but time is usually the great healer.

But chronic back pain, pain that continues for three months or more, is a different story. It can make your life miserable within end in sight.

What doctors call degenerative disk disease is the most common cause of back pain, especially in people over 50. What that means is that the disks (think of little pillows of cartilage between the vertebrae) begin to lose their buoyancy, eventually resulting in bones grinding on bones or nerves like the sciatic  nerve that runs down the back of your legs, to become entrapped between vertebrae.

In any case, it is extremely painful and can destroy your quality of life.

There are many ways of dealing with chronic back pain, some more effective than others. I’ve observed over the years that back pain is very subjective and what works wonders for one person may be completely ineffective for another.  What seems to be the most effective is to choose from a smorgasbord of therapies, usually discovering your personal “sweet spot” by trial and error.

Conventional medicine offers:

• Surgery: 600,000 back surgeries are performed each year. Most common procedures are fusion of disks and laminectomy where portions of bone and disks are removed. Less than 30 percent of people with back surgery are able to return to their former lifestyle without pain medications.
• Steroid injections: About half of patients who receive epidural injections of corticosteroids report pain relief for a few weeks to a year or more. Long-term use can result  in heart problems, liver failure, neurological damage and obesity.
• Opiate pharmaceuticals: These prescription drugs can relieve pain, but they carry with the risk of addiction, heart problems, chronic constipation and breathing  problems.
• Physical therapy and chiropractic:  Barely within the realm of conventional medicine, specific exercises can be very effective.

Now we are going to slide over into the alternative/complementary/functional medicine category:

• Herbal anti-inflammatories: curcumin, boswellia, holy basil and ginger are the best-known natural anti-inflammatories. Research shows they are at least as effective as pharmaceuticals without the negative side effects.
• Acupuncture: This ancient Chinese practice can be extremely effective for some people as energy is re-directed and blockages to the body’s natural healing abilities are removed. I put Chinese medicine, medical chi gong and reiki in the same category. While these therapies are not at all the same the same, they are all high effective energetic healing modalities.
• Anti-inflammatory diet: This therapy is fairly recent. The theory is that sugar, artificial sweeteners, products made with flour, gluten and processed foods all increase the body’s inflammatory response, aggravating back pain and many other conditions like diabetes and obesity. Changing to a low glycemic diet rich in healthy whole foods, organic as much as possible, can be an important step toward relieving the pain.
• Inversion: If you’ve never tried one of those inversion tables or chairs, I highly recommend you give it a try! This was the last puzzle piece (along with an anti-inflammatory diet) that helped my husband relieve years of chronic back pain, almost overnight. There are dozens of reasons why getting upside is good for your health, and relieving back is just one of them.