How to Fix Chronic Low Back Pain

Why this resource is helpful:

"Chronic Pain research is missing one major thing, fixing moving habits. Read why that is so important to pain.

We have written extensively on the neurological component of chronic pain. There is now a continual stream of evidence supporting the neuroadaptive process of chronic pain and the importance of educating patients in that process. We feel that there is a large missing intervention in all of these studies and patients and we believe the system at Move Better fills that void.

The Biomechanical Cycle of Low Back Pain
We do believe that the start of any chronic pain cycle is a true injury, either within a single moment or acquired over thousands of cycles. Many of our patients can clearly and specifically recreate their initial injury even though it was decades ago. This level of detail is not an accident and highlights how engrained this memory is to their pain. Ask these same patients what they had for breakfast a week ago and we only get blank stares. Ask what position they were in when they hurt their back and they can show us right away. Unlike most chronic pain research, we can actually see why this cycle of pain has continued in a very real mechanical way to encourage the cycle of over-protection that occurs in chronic pain. We can see the neurological support ("I have a weak back") of chronic pain but we also see a pattern of movement that keeps injuring that site of pain. This analysis of pattern is missing in research and this is one of our major goals as a clinic. Make clinicians evaluate movement pattern and we have even made our own system to do so.

The Start of Chronic Low Back Pain
In our experience, low back injuries rarely happen due to significant loads or traumas. We have had countless parents hurt their back lifting up their small (less than 45 lbs) child. We have had even more talk to us about a simple bending over to tie their shoes or pick up their keys create excruciating pain in their low back (these are actual stories we have been told by patients repeatedly). By far, the most common root of low back pain is not even known. It just happened slowly over time and never went away. There was no single moment or instance where things just went wrong. On the flip side, we rarely see low back pain start with a high load traumatic event. Almost zero patients coming in have a story of lifting a truly heavy object or experiencing a traumatic impact. The small exception to this is patients that were in a motor vehicle accident, but even then that is a small percentage of people who have chronic symptoms from an automobile accident. We must, however, admit a population bias. People with traumatic injuries likely go to a hospital versus a chiropractic clinic. We also have treated somewhere in the thousands and not in the tens of thousands. We are also only in the Pacific Northwest. With that said, it is fair to say that chronic low back pain can start with a traumatic event AND without a traumatic event."

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