Oh My Aching Back!

In the past month or so I've been having rather severe back pain. I've had it before, but it's come and gone after only a few days and some Ibuprophen or Tylenol as needed. However this time it seemed to be going on for over a couple of weeks.

The pain would get up to a level of 7 or so on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being high, and it was keeping me awake unless I took about 600 mg. of Ibuprofen some nights. The pain would also seem to get worse as the day progressed, especially if I was pretty busy at work. So what to do? I decided to make an appointment with my primary physician, but I couldn't get in for a couple of weeks.

By the time my appointment came up my back was better, but I thought I'd go anyway just to make sure I wasn't needing some diagnostic tests and to see if I should avoid any particular activity.

My provider asked me a lot of questions, including if I was having any numbness or tingling, which I wasn't. She hit my knees with her little hammer and had me press against her hands with my feet and performed a few other physical manipulations. She told me she didn't think I had any disc problem that would warrant an MRI.

What she offered was a referral to physical therapy or doing some exercises on my own. I chose the latter. She gave me some printouts for low back pain exercises with text and pictures for “standing hamstring stretch, cat and camel, quadruped arm/leg raises, pelvic tilt, partial curl, piriformis (no kidding) stretch and extension exercises. I've tried a few of them, which are similar to some of my yoga stretches, and find them fairly easy to do. The usual problem of fitting them into my schedule is the next challenge.

The main idea she said, is to strengthen the core or middle part of my body. These exercises seem like they can sure do that.

My printout listed some good activities for people with back problems. They are walking, bicycling, swimming and cross-country skiing. No chance for the last one here in Missouri.

Specific sports to avoid that can be dangerous to your back are football, soccer, volleyball, handball, weight lifting, trampoline, tobogganing, sledding, snowmobiling and ice hockey. My doctor told me that running might also aggravate my pain because of the jarring. So I'm going to scratch all these activities off my “bucket list.”