Sunday, February 5, 2012

What are the Causes of Back Pain?

By James Tan


Back pain is one of the common ailments suffered today. In fact, almost 20% of the entire Singapore population suffers from back and neck pain at any one point in time.

Despite it being such a common ailment, determining the exact cause of back pain is often difficult. By breaking down back pain into stages, Physiotherapy treatment and Core Stability training can help alleviate pain and work towards preventing recurring back pain over the long term. Today, conservative treatment is able to resolve some 95% of back pain cases when attended to at the right time. Only 5% of patients really need surgery.

One of the reasons as to why it is hard to determine the cause of back pain is its complex structural nature. It is made up of joints, disc, ligaments, nerves, vertebrae, muscle, fascia and other soft tissues. Pain is often a a result of one these structures failing combined with a physiological and external environmental factors. Until these sources and factors are sorted out, the pain will recur.

This complexity makes it difficult to determine the primary cause of back pain and consequently, difficult to treat effectively. Given that the problem is likely to come from multiple sources, our treatment approach too has to take a multi-prong approach. A deep understanding of the causes of back pain is important to the successful treatment of back pain.

Baring external causes like a fall or an accident, our back pains is most likely a result of the amount of stress we place on our spine.

The repeated and prolonged stress that is placed back affects our spine structures in a whole lot of different ways. It may cause our discs to bulge, our ligaments to over-stretch, muscles to strain and joints to wear down a lot quicker.

When the spine and all its components are working together, we enjoy such a great range of motion. However, when a single component fails be it a disc or a joint, we experience pain and suffer a greatly reduced range of movement.

A healthy back is a result of the rigid structure such as the spine and the soft support structures like the muscles working smoothly together controlled by a healthy nervous system. Muscles should contract and relax at the right times and by the right amounts. Otherwise, movement by these structure are either too rigid or too loose/unstable.

In a study of back pain sufferers, it was found that they more often than not, a delayed activation of their deep abdominal muscles when moving. These deep abdominal or core muscles activated too slowly to help stabilise the spine during movement.

Core stability exercises are specific exercises targeted at these deep abdominal muscles. Strengthening them and learning to better activate them can relieve and prevent low back pain from recurring.




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