Back Pain

What are common back pain causes?

Back pain develops for many reasons. Acute injuries can tear ligaments and muscles, damage the spongy discs between your vertebrae, and misalign the bones. Auto and work accidents, playing sports, falls, and poor lifting techniques can cause these kinds of injuries.

Acute back pain starts suddenly when the damage occurs. Overuse injuries take longer to develop because the damage builds up over time, caused by repetitive movements for long periods. Other chronic back pain conditions include:

• Degenerative disc disease
• Bulging and herniated discs   
• Sciatica
• Arthritis
• Spondylolisthesis (slipping vertebrae)
• Vertebral compression fractures 
• Scoliosis (spinal curvature abnormality)
• Spinal stenosis

These conditions are often linked. For example, degenerative disc disease causes your discs to dry and flatten. This weakens them, making them more likely to herniate. Osteoarthritis causes bone spurs to grow and thickens ligaments. All these problems contribute to spinal stenosis, where the spinal canal narrows.

Nerve compression can cause pain and unpleasant tingling, prickling, weakness, and numbness (radiculopathy). Symptoms often spread into the arms or legs (depending on where the nerve compression occurs). Sciatica is a common example where lower back sciatic nerve compression (lumbar radiculopathy) causes shooting pain down a leg.

What treatment does back pain require?

Mild back pain should improve if you avoid activities that aggravate it and ice the area for a few days. If your pain doesn’t resolve, is more severe, worsens, or causes radiculopathy symptoms, visit NeuroSpine Center of Wisconsin for an evaluation.

Frontline back pain treatments include physical therapy, medication, and activity modification. In most cases, gentle movement is better than immobility, so avoid staying in bed for days. Depending on your back pain’s cause, you might benefit from:  

• Manual therapy
• Dry needling
• Myofascial release
• Massage therapy
• Assistive devices
• Back braces
• Orthobiologics like platelet-rich plasma (PRP)
• Injections

Injections might be beneficial if noninvasive treatments don’t improve your symptoms sufficiently. Nerve blocks — which can also help diagnose back pain — contain a local anesthetic that numbs the area for a short time.

Steroid injections have long-lasting anti-inflammatory effects. Depending on your pain’s source, you might need epidural or facet joint injections. If these approaches don’t work, you might require a procedure requiring advanced surgical techniques like radiofrequency ablation or spinal cord stimulation to numb the nerves.

What surgeries eliminate back pain?

If no other treatments ease back pain, the NeuroSpine Center of Wisconsin team offers several surgeries that could help, including:

• Cervical and lumbar discectomy for disc herniation
• Anterior and posterior lumbar interbody fusion for degenerative disc disease
• Lumbar laminectomy for spinal stenosis
• Lumbar and cervical instrumentation surgery
• Corpectomy decompression surgery

The team specializes in advanced surgical techniques, reducing tissue damage and pain and promoting a faster recovery.

Call NeuroSpine Center of Wisconsin to arrange a back pain evaluation today.