Said a frustrated Laurie (age 44), who injured her lower back during a hike with her family two years ago. She’s been suffering from the deep ‘tooth-ache’ feeling in her lower back that is now affecting every aspect of her life and her general health is suffering as well.
“Could this be happening to you?”
Low back pain is becoming more common every single day because as a society we are spending more time sitting and less time moving than ever before. Low back pain comes from a variety of reasons, but commonly from a distorted connective tissue balance creating impingement at the joint articulations or causing nerve compressions that pass through the pelvic girdle, anteriorly, or posteriorly. There are many misconceptions today about how you should “treat” low back pain, aka: Lumbago.
Unfortunately, like Laurie, I’ve treated too many people who have become victims of bad medical advice when treating low back pain. This often leads to months (even years) of unnecessary low back suffering. “I’ve tried rest, chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, pills, topical creams, injections, and nothing has helped long term. I’m still in pain daily, but mostly when I sit/stand for a long time. I’ve had x-rays and an MRI which show some degeneration of the cartilage, but other structural changes noted."
At the time, she injured herself while hiking in the local Loma Linda Hills, she was doing yoga twice a week, eating healthy, and going to a fitness bootcamp twice a week. But when her low back pain struck, it didn’t just take away her ability to exercise. Sitting, driving, bending, and just doing normal daily tasks wore on her. The shooting, pain in her low back just never seemed to go away (it didn’t help that she had a 10-year-old girl who is an active softball player and plays on a traveling club team).
She had tried everything:
- Ice / Heat
- Tennis ball self-tissue work
- Stretches to her hamstrings and Piriformis
- Core exercises done, found no relief
- Options were being exhausted and the thought of not being able to stay physically fit bothered her and started to make her feel trapped.
Why weren’t these treatments working?
Laurie, like so many others had fallen into the trap of trying to fix the symptoms of pain. She had spent countless hours (and dollars) on PT, massages, chiropractic, and acupuncture trying to fix her low back pain, but the pain never went away. Even though the treatments temporarily get rid of the pain, it was making her injury worse.
Why was it making it worse?
Like ‘picking a scab’ that is trying to heal. The more she tried to stretch and massage the low back, the more irritated it became. But Laurie, was finally able to find relief by focusing her attention on taking pressure, tension, and strain off her hip (instead of doing treatment directly on her hip).
What does it mean to take strain OFF her hip?
You can choose to believe it or not, but everything in our body is truly “CONNECTED.” And a combination of old injuries, poor posture and bad habits all place tension and pressure on the low back and pelvic girdler complex unsymmetrically. And this creates the syndrome, the dysfunction, the disease in her pelvic girdle.
This is a phenomenon known as ‘COMPENSATION.’
And for Laurie, we identified four areas of her body, which had been largely ignored since she’d been so focused on trying to fix the symptom of her low back.
1. Tight hip flexor muscles.
2. An old knee injury from skiing.
3. A muscle spasm in her middle back.
4. Tightness and tension on her good side.
And by addressing these problems with a mixture of:
Hands-on specialized myofascial release therapy to open the tightened muscle of her hip and low back. Reducing adhesions from restricted tissue lengths ‘knots’ in the muscles along her knee. Alleviating the tensional loads off the mid back and upper back. Teaching her proper stretches to both sides of her body w/ a prescription of stretch parameters specific to optimal healing.
The low back pain finally released, and she started to feel…. balance.
It was gone, finally the feeling of NOTHING with sitting, hiking, going back to fitness boot camps, or driving.
And as a Result? Not taking any more injections or pain pills. Finally, can make that trip out to Orange County and back without her low back throbbing and aching. Even though Laurie had sciatic pain for two years, and was diagnosed with arthritis and degeneration, but taking a whole-body approach, viewing her as a CONNECTED specimen, Laurie was finally able to heal.
Could your low back pain problem be coming from somewhere else in your body?
If you’ve been struggling with hip or low back problems for longer than a month, and you want to learn more about what these ‘root causes’ could be.
At Rendon Physical Therapy, we offer FREE mobility screens at our ‘Discovery Visits.’
You will have a private session with a mobility specialist here at Rendon Physical Therapy, where you’ll get the chance to:
Share your concerns, problems and frustrations you may be having.
Meet us in person, to see if we’re a good fit before you ever decide to work with us
A glimpse into your own ‘mobility profile’ to help you see exactly what could be causing your injury and tell you the ‘root cause’ of WHY you may be hurting.
Visit us at RendonPT.org or call us at 909-796-4342 and tell us a bit more about what’s going on, and we’ll have a conversation about how we may be able to help.