Recovering From A Lower Back Injury With Your Chiropractor's Help

It only takes a second to pull muscles or injure a disk in your lower back. The result can be debilitating pain that takes several weeks from which to recover. Your local chiropractor can help the healing process while reducing your discomfort. Here is how chiropractic treatment helps you get over a painful lower back injury.

Non-Invasive Treatment Approaches

Your chiropractor uses non-invasive treatments to relieve the pain and support the natural healing process in your back. They will offer a combination of treatments focused on the initial injury and the secondary issues caused by the injury. The initial injury causes muscles in your back to become tense, which irritates the nerves in the area causing more pain. Severely tense muscles develop painful spasms. The treatment addresses these painful muscle issues.

Active Release Techniques

Your chiropractor does this procedure to relieve muscle tension in your lower back. The doctor identifies tense muscle groups and massages them in the direction they normally move. The muscles respond by slowly relaxing. This increases circulation in the area and reduces inflammation and stiffness.

Range of Motion Therapy

Your chiropractor will recommend physical rehabilitation therapy to move your lower back muscles slowly through all of their normal range of motion. Tense muscles make your back feel stiff. This therapy relaxes the muscles and increases the blood circulation through the lower back, which improves healing.

Muscle Strengthening

Another form of physical therapy may be recommended to strengthen the muscles in your back. Once you've regained the range of motion in your lower back muscles, they can be made stronger to better support your back during healing. When the initial injury has healed, these stronger back muscles will also reduce your risk of future back injury.

Back Braces

You can be fitted for custom back supports that make doing activities that put stress on your back less painful. Your chiropractor will recommend that these devices only be used sparingly and while also doing physical therapy on the back muscles. Back supports can cause back muscles to become weaker, which slows down your healing. Limited use of back supports while continuing range of motion and strength therapy prevents the muscle weakness.

Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS)

This treatment temporarily reduces pain in your lower back. Electrodes are placed over your lower back and a small electrical charge is sent into the area with the tense muscles. This disrupts the response from the nerves to the brain so you'll feel less pain. This treatment does not cure a lower back problem, but it can make the physical therapy on those muscles less painful and more effective.

Contact a local chiropractor, like those at Back To Health Chiropractic & Wellness or similar offices, for more ideas and information.

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