Well sorry to all my readers for slacking this week. With family in town and the practice up and running…I think I am going to have to outsource my blogging.
This week I decided to do an easy link to the Chiropractic world… LOW BACK PAIN (LBP). If you have ever experienced low back pain it is not fun. I myself have had the occasion to have back pain in the past. In fact a LBP sufferer just walked into my office…
Back… Well you may have guessed there are plenty of ways to injure your low back. Some of those ways include the dreaded “pinched nerve,” or the Sprain or Strain of the surrounding tissues (muscles sprain, tendons strain) and even “back spasms,” and of course Subluxation (see previous disease of the week post) of the low back and sacrum areas. Of course there are a few more reasons for back pain these are just a few. There is one source of back pain that I imagine would not be so easy to guess…
The Neck… yes, the neck and to be more specific… the Upper Neck or Upper Cervical region of the neck. In fact to be even more specific the top two neck bones of the body, the Atlas (top) and the Axis (2nd from the top) can be the source of major low back pain. Well I bet you are wondering how that area of the neck could be causing your low back pain. It is actually quite easy to explain (though it is more complicated than this simple explanation).
Most of us are imbued with a quality known as “the Righting Reflex”. This reflex simply tells your body to keep your eyes and ears level with the horizon. So when you bump your head or get into an accident, or are born,… the muscles in the upper neck area tighten, usually on one side, and
cause the head to tilt or rotate or something that makes your head not be on strait. Well usually you don’t see a lot of people with their head flopped over to the side, instead what happens is the muscles in the mid and low back on the opposite side contract causing the shoulder on the same side as the flopped head to raise up and push the head over so the eyes and ears can be level to the ground again (the righting reflex). Now the contracting of the mid and low back muscles to correct the position of the head also pull up the hip on the same side as the contracting muscles. Unfortunately the correction that your body just made to the position of your head now also created some instability in the low back area. The amount of how much the hips and shoulders are pulled up may be tiny, but when they do they cause the muscles to work in an inappropriate manner causing that instability. Over time when muscles overwork tighten up and pull on the bones and spine in that area it causes instability that over time causes the low back to hurt; sometimes this chronic tightening can even cause the dreaded “pinched nerve” or back spasms or if left uncorrected too long the “prolapsed” disc may even come into play.
The pain and foreseeable problem may be in the low back and there may be some things that can be done to mask the pain, BUT THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM IS THE UPPER NECK AREA, and your pain will not subside permenantly until something can be done to correct the source of the problem … the Upper Neck Bones.
So the next time your buddy exclaims, “oh my back hurts,” or ,”I cannot seem to get rid of my back pain, I have done everything,” you can say, “maybe its your neck bud, you need to go to Simply Health Chiropractic to make sure.”
And that is what we do at Simply Health Chiropractic, we stabilize and correct the subluxation in the upper neck area without popping or cracking or rotating of the neck during the adjustment; to allow the spine to unwind and remove nerve interference allowing the body and brain to communicate more effectively thus allowing the body to heal more effectively on its own.
So stop by or call during general business hours to see how we are different and how we can help your health.
