Why Painkillers Don’t Work For Back Pain

Why A Back Injury Doesn’t Get Better With Painkillers

If we’re talking about a lower back injury, the main parts of that area of the spine you will likely injure will be the discs, the facet joints or any other ligaments and smaller muscular structures that support and protect the lumbar spine. In reality, you’re more than likely to injure multiple areas at any one time. This area of the body works together in such an interrelated manner, so this is why you may be more likely to damage multiple areas. If you compare this type of an injury, to an ankle sprain, you would probably go to your GP and if they were to say to just take some strong painkillers and walk it off, you’d probably be a bit confused.

Walking on an ankle injury and just taking painkillers sounds counterproductive, because you need to use the area constantly to walk. What they would probably instead say is ‘maybe take these painkillers, but let’s put it in a strap (or use a crutch) to support it.’ Helping the ankle to not bear weight will be helpful in allowing it time enough to rest from the everyday pressure walking would place on the injury. Furthermore, if you would just take painkillers you probably wouldn’t feel the pain every time you placed your foot to the floor, which would potentially cause you to walk more on it than you should as the foot heals, causing this healing process to lengthen.

The Purpose Of Pain In The Body

Pain has a purpose. It is there to warn you that something isn’t quite right. You’re in pain because you’ve injured your lower back, and using painkillers to numb this sensation of pain so that you can carry on causing more damage, is not such a sensible move. Generally speaking, if you bend forwards for example and your back gives you a lot of pain for doing that, the pain is telling you to not do that because you’re squashing the disc more, because bending forwards is a problem for people with disc injuries. If the problem is in your facet joints, aching backwards might be a problem for you instead. Now, this pain doesn’t need to be severe for you to understand what’s going on inside your body, so we’re certainly not saying that you should go without them if they are helpful for you. It’s important to be more conscious about why you’re taking the painkillers. A lot of patients are looking for a solution, rather than just to numb the pain.

Because there is such confusion around using pain killers as well as rehab exercises for lower back pain, we created a series of protocols to help this. The fact of the matter is that it will be necessary to rehab your back properly if you’ve got back pain. There is however a mine-field of information and misinformation out there when it comes to back pain. If you would like to know more about how to fix your back from home then check out the information below.

The solution if the back pain is chronic

When it comes down to more chronic back pain, you’ll find that the levels of pain are disproportionate to the levels of tissue damage. This is when the symptom picture can be problematic for you as the patient. There is a wave of practitioners now touting that ‘pain is in the brain’ as some sort of consolation. Unfortunately this is backed up by research in part, the signals in your nervous system are inappropriately classifying the chronic stimulation. This however is not an excuse to not treat the injured area as it is likely that there is some degree of tissue damage there still.

With these more chronic cases, there is a need to have a more robust approach, and help the patient get off painkillers and return to normal activity. We find that frequently patients with more complicated back pain causes have not had the correct level of detailed analysis employed during their previous diagnostic processes. They also have not had treatments that are effective enough to deal with the issue, sometimes having had nothing more than massage and exercise for a condition that has been going on for years.

Fortunately, those that can make it to see us at The Mayfair Clinic will get much better treatment. We take pride in our unrivalled approach to treating back pain without surgery and provide what we believe is the most robust approach to helping patients with chronic back pain return to normality.

To learn more about our approach check out our new patients page, as well as our treatments page and get in contact with our team to get your back better today. Finally, remember, you can always join our Back In Shape Program to start getting some relief today, until you can make the trip to see us in the clinic, click here for more information.