How long does it take for back pain to go away

Lower back injuries are a fact of life. Back pain will affect all our lives at some point – the research is clear on this. The injury to our back could be minor or very severe. One of the minor lower back injuries that we can all expect to suffer from is a lower back strain.

A lower back strain is when you strain the muscles in your lower back. Your lower back contains muscles and ligaments that connect to the bones in your back. They provide the bones with some stability and strength. When you strain these back muscles, it means that you have stretched them too far. This causes tiny tears to form in the muscles. These tears make the muscles weaker meaning they can’t hold the bones in your back in place correctly. The spine then becomes less stable, and this causes lower back pain.

Because you have nerves that stretch out from your spine to all other areas of your body, lower back pain can cause pain in a lot of other areas too. Some places affected by lower back pain include your arms, hips, legs and feet.

The important thing to remember, is that on the whole, lower back pain is of mechanical nature. This means something is stretched, torn or damaged, and will be aggravated and/or relieved by particular movements of the back. More sinister causes of lower back pain such as prostate tumours, have very different characteristics & can be weeded out swiftly and dealt with appropriately. For the sake of this article, we are focusing on mechanical causes of back pain.

Diagnosing lower back injuries

When a patient comes to The Mayfair Clinic their treatment always starts with a diagnosis at their first consultation. This consultation delves deep into the patient’s life and their medical history. This is to find out about the patient’s activity level, what they do for work, if they have ever suffered from a back condition before and anything else that may help us identify the cause of their back pain. A lot of people don’t quite realise the challenges they face in recovering from lower back pain if they are very inactive and have poor muscle tone.

Once we know more about the patient, we begin a physical exam of their back and any other places that they feel symptoms. At The Mayfair Clinic, we ask our patients to go into as much detail about their symptoms as possible. This helps us to map out areas of concern and then examine them when we perform the physical exam.

The physical exam for back pain may involve a lot of special tests and asking the patient to move their arms and legs. This is to help us see which movements cause pain and the special tests are to discover which internal spinal structures have been injured, such as the disc or facet joints. Once we have a rough area of a patient’s back mapped out, we can start to formulate a treatment and rehabilitation strategy.

Recovering from a lower back injury

Recovering from a lower back injury can take anywhere from a week to a year, and unfortunately we see patients who have been suffering for much longer than this. You see, it all depends on the lower back condition causing your symptoms. Thankfully we have some fantastic technology in the clinic, supported by evidence and research. Each treatment alone is great. What sets us apart is the way in which we combine these treatments to enhance the results for our patients. For most of our patients, many of whom have severe lower back pain, get good recovery in as little as 3 to 4 weeks. Some of the worst cases require a little longer, up to 12 weeks or so in these cases is typical. At your consultation, our team will be able to go into detail the likely timescales to recovery.

If you’re suffering from a lower back injury and need help, contact us today using the form below to see just how The Mayfair Clinic could help get you back to normal.