There are a lot of people that go through their life dealing with a low level of chronic pain. Some have lived with their pain for so long that they no longer notice it. Frequently, it seems, TV ads blame your mattress (of course trying to get you to buy their “better” and usually more expensive mattress). Other TV ads claim your pain may be due to stress or things polluting your environment, leading pain sufferers to head for the drug store to find any type of painkiller to help them deal with their daily routine.
Chiropractic just may be the answer you’re looking for to help with your low back pain, whether your condition is recent or of a more chronic nature. Many times your low back pain can be caused by the back muscles pulling unevenly on either side of your spine. This results in soreness, aches and pains, or even a “pinched nerve.” Another possibility is that your problems are from the bones of the spine, in which case a chiropractor should be considered since they deal specifically with the back.
Not all chiropractors are created equal however. In chiropractic medicine there seem to be two general schools of thought. The first is that chiropractics deals solely with physical issues of the spine and back, and the alignment thereof. Practitioners of this traditional form of the trade use only their hands and sometimes the help of diagnostic imaging to make corrections to the alignment of the spine and solve back pain.
The other, perhaps more new age school of thought involves something called a subluxation, which is a single misaligned vertebra which may hamper blood or energy flow up and down the spine. Subluxation based doctors believe they can solve nearly every bodily ill by correcting and preventing these subluxations with a constant regimen of maintenance, and often offer themselves as general practitioners as well, with a complete line of nutritional supplements.
For this reason it is important to look for a chiropractor with experience in sports medicine or who specializes in back pain. They will be able to either identify and fix the problem in your back that is causing you pain, or be able to identify if it is something more serious which spinal manipulation may actually make worse. The spine is a delicate area and one wrong move can leave a person paralyzed or worse. It is important to treat it with care and precision, but with the right chiropractor your lower back pain is in good hands.
