Back Strain: Accelerate Your Recovery with These Tips
Back Strain: Treatment Guidelines for Back Strain
Most back strains do not require specific treatment, because they usually recover spontaneously in relatively short period of time. There are, however, certain strategies that may help you recover faster and make the process less painful. For full list of detailed recommendations on optimizing your recovery process please follow this link.
Mobility: swimming and walkingOne of the most important things to keep in mind, is that during the acute phase, it is of outmost importance to stay mobile. While short term bed rest may help to relieve some of the pain initially, staying in the bed more than 24-48 hrs leads to worse outcomes and prolongs the recovery time.
While becoming more mobile is important, you will need to initially modify your daily routine to avoid high impact activities, lifting heavy objects and twisting movements. The best way start increasing physical activity is walking for few minutes several times a day and eventually transitioning to recreational swimming in a slow pace. Swimming is excellent exercise for recovery from back injuries. It’s weightless nature eliminates gravity and pressure on the spine and takes the muscles and joints through full range of motion. Both activities will keep the muscles engaged without additional strain, and get them slowly ready for more physically demanding exercises.
HeatHeat plays important role in the treatment of back pain. It improves local blood circulation which enables the injured tissue to heal faster while decreasing muscle stiffness and pain. Applying heat to the painful area after the initial 48 hrs from the onset of the injury also helps with stretching. Additionally, heat reduces pain and makes movement easier when getting out of the bed in the morning. Heating pad should not be applied directly on the skin. While it can be used several times a day, it should never be applied for longer than 20 minutes at a time. Never sleep on your heating pad!!
Stretching, Massage and AcupunctureGentle stretching of the back muscles after using heating pad is important to slowly start elongating the tight muscles. Never push beyond the level of gentle stretch. If stretching is painful, you need to pull back. Gentle massage around the painful area can be very relaxing and soothing. You do not need to spend money on massage therapist, but if you can afford it, this might be a good time to splurge on couple sessions. Getting a simple massage from your partner at least once a day for the first few days can be equally if not more effective. Alternately, you can try self-acupressure using a tennis ball while leaning against the wall and finding the tender spots in your back. Both massage and acupressure help to promote local blood circulation and loosen up the tight muscles which results in increased mobility and less pain. If acupuncture is available to you, getting few treatment sessions can be very helpful to promote relaxation of the tight muscles, increase local blood circulation and decrease pain. For more information about acupuncture please follow this link.
The role of pain medicationWhile pain medication will not help you to recover faster, they can help to make the process more bearable. Motrin, naproxen or Alleve can be used in mild to moderate pain, to take the edge off the pain. Stronger pain medication, prescribed by your provider, may be necessary when pain is more severe.
Goals for pain management
It is very important to understand, that complete pain relief is neither realistic, nor the goal of pain medication or any treatment modality discussed in this article. Pain is a protective mechanism. It makes us start paying attention to our body and prevents us from causing further damage. Additionally, there is no single best remedy. Patience in combination with several treatment strategies placed in the context of a comprehensive treatment protocol, has been shown to lead to the best and fastest recovery.
To learn more about complementary therapies, visit National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health
Acute Pain Management: A Guide to Complementary Therapies
Acute Pain Management: A Guide to Complementary Therapies
Increasing number of patients do not wish to take any pain medication when they develop acute pain from fear of side effect. There is an ongoing battle and numerous initiatives to fight the opioid crisis around the world. It is also true that every medication carries a risk of side effects.
Complementary medicine such as acupuncture, massage, yoga and meditation has been used to ease the pain and treat acute and chronic injuries long before contemporary medicine became the standard of care. The question arises, should we shy away from conventional pain medication for controlling acute pain and focus primarily on complementary modalities, because they are generally safer and mostly free of side effects?
In this post I will try to present unbiased view of both sides and attempt to come up with the answer that I have found in my practice most successful.
Conventional medicine and acute painConventional pain medication maintains a bad rap in minds of many people. This is especially true for those who are more in tuned with their body and look for complementary medicine as the primary treatment option for their daily maladies.
While managing daily aches and pains with stretching, massage, yoga or acupuncture is definitely very reasonable and preferred option, situation slightly changes in case of intense acute pain.
It is important to understand that there is a role for pain medication when it comes to severe pain. Getting your pain under control as soon as possible will prevent altering the way your brain deals with pain.
Any uncontrolled pain lasting longer than several days can sensitize your brain to pain and lower your pain threshold. This ultimately translates to experiencing pain from similar injury in the future at much lower level than before.
Complementary medicine and acute pain Complementary medical modalities have been used successfully for management of pain and injuries for hundreds of years. Many of them have been extensively studied and their effectiveness proven in rigorous trials.
Despite their popularity, however, their primary role is generally seen in management of chronic conditions. This is largely because their main mechanism of action, by which they help to promote recovery, is through stimulating body’s own healing processes and pain control.
In other words, their primary role is to restore the body homeostasis. The subtle changes they produce over time are sufficient to create a noticeable difference when treating chronic pain or injuries.
It is, however, usually not enough to promote lasting pain relief in severe acute pain. But that doesn’t mean these modalities cannot be used successfully even in cases of significantly severe pain.
There are many practitioners who are quite skillful and capable to accomplish “miraculous” results. This author has treated successfully many patients with significant amount of acute pain in his own private practice with acupuncture and herbal medicine.
The problem with using modalities such as acupuncture for treatment of severe acute pain, becomes with the access to these skillful practitioners and the associated cost. In case of acupuncture, it takes years of experience, and additional training in treatment of musculoskeletal injuries to treat patients with severe acute pain, to achieve reliable results.
When seeing an acupuncturist for treatment of chronic conditions, weekly sessions are generally sufficient to achieve great results. This is, however, not true in case of significant acute pain.
To successfully treat an acute pain, the practitioner will need to see the patient generally up to three times a week for the first two weeks and usually will also prescribe an herbal formula. At the average cost of $70 -$100 per office visit, this can easily add up to $300 - $400 a week x 2.
This also does not account for the travel time to and from the office and lost work. Compared to a small co-pay for an office visit with a primary care provider and pain medication if the patient has a medical insurance, this becomes a significant financial burden that majority of patients cannot afford. Just because it is possible, doesn’t therefore mean that it is always feasible and the right thing to do.
Eclectic Approach An eclectic approach to pain management is in this author’s opinion the best. In the eclectic approach, the patient uses combination of several modalities which complement each other to achieve the best result.
Combining one or several complementary modalities such as acupuncture, acupressure, massage, yoga, breathing exercises and meditation along with pain medication, will have much greater effectiveness than using any of them as a standalone modality.
This combined approach takes the best from both worlds so to speak. The complementary medical modalities slowly work on helping the body recover faster, while pain medication helps to control the acute pain and allows the patient to focus on the recovery process.
Getting sufficient amount of sleep, staying physically active and following an anti-inflammatory diet will further maximize the healing. For more details on how to optimize your recovery process follow this link.
To learn more about complementary therapies, visit National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health
