Your spine is an intricate anatomical scaffold that supports your entire body. You’d be a blob without it. Each vertebra, each disc, is essential. What’s more, there is a complex series of 32 spinal nerves that help messages get relayed through your body.
When any of those things go awry, you might experience pain throughout your spine or in one localized spot. It might feel disabling, but there are options for treating it.
Yoga and Meditation
Practicing yoga and meditation on a regular basis can help you develop mindfulness techniques that keep you in communication with your body. Yoga is all about breathing and allowing your body to relax even when you are stretching those sore muscles in your back.
Browse through YouTube and find a yoga instructor whose techniques work for you. I personally follow Jen Hilman, a professional massage therapist and yogi whose workouts range from beginner level to advanced.
Injection-based Treatments
Injections are something many with back pain end up getting. These outpatient procedures are performed by spine and pain management specialists and do not require much recovery time. A series of nerve blocks and/or epidural steroidal injections can target specific areas in the spine that are causing chronic pain.
Injections can completely cease the pain or at least stop it for a period of time. They can serve as helpful diagnostic tools as well as treatment methods, allowing your specialist to pinpoint more specific problems.
Chiropractic Adjustments
Here at Midtown Chiropractic and Natural Medicine, we treat subluxations in the spine by administering gentle chiropractic adjustments. Subluxations along the spine happen when a vertebra is shifted out of alignment with all the others. This can result in a good amount of pain and stiffness. It can result in a loss of functionality and impact other parts of the body, especially if a nerve gets impacted.
Seeing a chiropractor means that these ‘kinks’ can be worked out. You might have to get two or three adjustments a week for the first few weeks, but you will be able to go a week or two in between adjustments after a while. Your chiropractor will come up with a treatment plan that caters directly to your unique needs.
Make Diet and Lifestyle Changes
Eating nutritious food, drinking enough water, cutting back on alcohol, eliminating smoking nicotine, and getting enough exercise are important steps to take. Make it a point to walk every day. If you can only do 15 minutes, that’s a great start. You will be able to build on that as you go. Commit to those changes and don’t be afraid to push yourself a little further.
You don’t have to live in pain and misery. Your spinal pain can be treated. Take the steps listed above and see how things go. Your pain might not go away right away, but you can get some relief from your pain symptoms.
A medial branch nerve block is a procedure of injecting a potent local anesthetic on the medial branch nerves that is connected to a specific facet joint.