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 may be your answer for low back pain, whether your pain just started or is more of a nagging, chronic pain. This is because most of the time your low back pain is caused by muscles in your back that pull unevenly on either side of your spine, resulting in soreness, a pinched nerve or just plain aches and pain. Another possibility is problems directly from the spine, in which case you certainly want to find a doctor that specializes in the back and spine, like a chiropractor.
Not every chiropractor is the same, however. In chiropractic medicine there seem to be two specific schools of thought. The first is of the opinion that chiropractics deals solely with physical issues of the spine and back, and the alignment thereof. Practitioners of this traditional form of chiropractic healthcare use only their hands and sometimes the help of diagnostic testing to make corrections to the alignment of the spine and reduce back pain.
The other involves something called a subluxation, which is a single misaligned vertebra putting pressure on the nervous system, which may hamper blood or energy flow up and down the spine. Some subluxation based doctors believe they can solve nearly every bodily ill by correcting and preventing these misalignments with a constant regimen of maintenance, and may offer themselves as general practitioners as well.
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.
