As a chiropractor I see many people with lower back pain in Apple Valley, MN and I am often asked to what the benefits are to seeking chiropractic care for lower back pain and what my recommendations are.
I recommend that if you have lower back pain, that you would see a chiropractor first. When seeking chiropractic care for lower back pain understand that it is a very general symptom. What we would want to do is find the root cause of what was causing that lower back pain, and not just treat the symptom.
Five benefits to seeing a chiropractor for lower back pain are:
Number 1 – A Listening Ear. What I hear a lot from my patients is that when you go to see a chiropractor for lower back pain versus an MD is that somebody actually listens to how their lower back pain is affecting their daily life. What I mean by that is we’re not just going to look at the x-ray, give you a diagnosis, tell you that you need surgery, and then kick you out the door. We’re really going to listen to why your low back pain is becoming a problem in your life. Maybe you can’t sit on the bleachers long enough to watch your kid’s basketball game. Or maybe you can’t drive to work without having intense pain in the car, so we’re going to really listen to you first of all.
Number 2 – Allowing Your Body to Heal Itself. A big component of chiropractic care for lower back pain is the belief that your body heals itself. A big part of what we do is to help your body heal itself, allowing you to take ownership over your own health. We’re not going to just do all the work for you. Your body contains so much intelligence and it knows what to do to heal. We are just going to guide it in that direction and support you along the way.
Number 3 – Very Few Negative Side Effects. By getting chiropractic care for your lower back pain you will not experience many (if any) negative side effects. If you go to have surgery, there’s a huge recovery time as well as long term side effects and limitations after the surgery, including pain in different areas and immobility. There can also be serious side effects to a lot of pain medications that would be prescribed. If you go to a chiropractor you may experience some muscle soreness afterwards, but beyond that there’s not any negative side effects to seeing a chiropractor.
Number 4 – Ability to Help You Beyond the Lower Back Pain. If you choose chiropractic care for your lower back pain, we will be able to help you beyond just that lower back pain. Let’s say you come in for lower back pain and we get that figured out, but you want to work on your ergonomics at your workstation. We can help you with that. Perhaps you want to work on nutrition. We can help you with that. We can go so much further beyond just your lower back pain and look more holistically at the rest of your daily life.
Number 5 – Much Lower Cost. Getting chiropractic care for lower back pain with is much less expensive than surgery. In addition, there is much less loss of work and longer-term savings in investing in your health. One thing I like to say is that healthcare is an investment, it’s not a cost. It doesn’t cost you money in the long run. If you choose to invest in your health care you will see a great return on your investment. If you think health care costs a lot, try being sick!
Another question I get asked often is when somebody comes to get chiropractic care for lower back pain will they typically get a chiropractic adjustment.
What we typically do on the first visit is take an x-ray of your full spine and do an exam including range of motion tests. On your second visit, we do a review of findings of those x-rays, any range of motion tests, and other orthopedic tests we did. Then, after that you’ll get a chiropractic adjustment. For future visits, we add other modalities and therapies, such as nutritional counseling or muscle work. It always starts with the chiropractic adjustment. That’s the foundation of everything that we do.
Some people in Apple Valley, MN have also asked how they can identify that they have acute lower back pain. Acute lower back pain is symptom based. If you come in with a “slipped disc” you will feel the acute lower back pain. We will work on your symptoms first. We want to put the fire out before we rebuild the house. But then once we get those symptoms under control, we definitely want to look a little bit deeper and find out why you’re having that acute low back pain, and what we can do to prevent that from coming back in the future.
What it means for somebody to have chronic low back pain is something that’s recurring. Let’s say, you have pain for a couple weeks, and it goes away, but a month later it comes back. Some people are just in constant pain. It’s incredible how many people, especially in our country, are living with chronic low back pain. And it’s, in my opinion, completely unnecessary for that many people to be suffering that much. And that’s why I’m so excited to be a chiropractor, and to be able to help, because we have, and will continue to, help so many people break free from that chronic lower back pain.
The kind of pain relief people can expect after seeing a chiropractor in Apple Valley, Minnesota for lower back pain is a case-by-case situation. Typically, within the first five visits or so you can start to feel some relief. If in that amount of time you feel no relief at all, nothing has changed, nothing has gotten better or worse, then we start looking at other options to help with that pain relief and long term healting.
We don’t prescribe pain medications at all. That’s not part of our scope of practice. And for a lot of chiropractors, that’s not really part of their practice either. Of course, those medications are there for you when you need them which can be such a blessing to have pain medications when you really need them. The trouble that we’ve gotten into in our country is a reliance on those pain medications which has led to an opioid crisis. We are here to encourage you to only use them if you absolutely need them. It’s great to have them, but not to rely on that as a strategy for relief long term as one of the side effects to pain medications, for pain relief, is the opioid crisis that has turned into such a huge problem in this country.
Thank you for reading!
