I guess after all you’ve tried, you still have back pain.
I’m also assuming that since people turn to unconventional sources of help only once they’ve exhausted their other options, you’ve tried a number of approaches to get rid of the pain and they haven’t been successful.
In resorting to these unsuccessful methods, you may have tried them armed with the hope born of professional assurances but without a technical understanding of how they work with your own body’s processes, or that the methods used to correct the problem were not the same. . It is not quite suitable (relevant) for the condition they used to correct. In any case, it’s likely that you and your doctors (all of them) had something in common: an incomplete view of the nature of your condition and how to solve it. The results are revealing; the “proof” of the pudding is in eating it.
Let’s take an inventory of some of the options you may have tried and their underlying operating assumptions.
YOUR DOCTOR
The diagnosis: one or more of the following: bulging disc, nerve compression, degenerative disc disease, spinal stenosis, facet joint syndrome, sprain, strain, or muscle spasm.
The premise: There is something wrong with your spine or back muscles.
The treatment: pain relievers, muscle relaxants, bed rest, strengthening exercises, stretching, surgery.
YOUR CHIROPRACTOR
The diagnosis: spinal subluxation (misalignment), emotional stress, poor diet.
The premise: Spinal misalignment causes back pain; You are under stress or there is something wrong with your diet.
The treatment: spinal adjustments, massage, dietary changes or dietary supplements, stress reduction techniques, spinal decompression therapy, laser treatment.
YOUR ACUPUNCTURIST
The diagnosis: blockage or stagnation of chi.
The Premise: Obstructed chi flow leads to disease.
The treatment: acupuncture, herbs.
YOUR PHYSICAL THERAPIST
The premises: irritation of the facet joints, instability of the ligaments, inflammation, hypermobility weak and/or tense muscles cause the pain.
The treatment: moist heat, stretching, strengthening or therapeutic exercises, ultrasound, electrical stimulation, tissue manipulation.
YOUR MASSAGER THERAPIST
The premises: tight muscles or restricted soft tissues cause pain
The treatment: massaging and stretching.
YOUR SURGEON
The premises: something is mechanically wrong with your spine: discs (bulging or herniated), vertebrae (stenosis, narrowing of the foramen), nerve root compression, bone spurs (osteophytes).
The treatment: removing discs, fusing or cutting the vertebrae and drilling the spinal canal (involves laminectomy), enlarging foramina, replacing discs, implanting rods – a mechanical approach, sometimes exactly necessary.
That’s enough to start.
Regardless of how verifiable the observations are and how reasonable the interpretations are, practitioners’ understanding of various practices is based on certain premises (assumptions) that determine how they interpret what they see happening in a person and whether they believe that what is happening in the person is occurring in spite of the person (diseases with external causes) or because of the person (lifestyle diseases). Some people confuse them because habits, like illnesses, feel involuntary (although they are often, but not always, formed from voluntary actions). So assumptions.
Simply put: people see what they learned (or were trained) to see. If the tool you have is a hammer, you start looking for nails. If nail polish is what you have on hand, chances are it involves nails as well. So it’s the nails, the nails. But we are more than nails. With narrow vision, one may not see enough of the situation to make enough of a difference.
We know from the results whether a mode of treatment really and effectively addressed the condition.
What some people may not have considered is that one approach may address a condition more effectively than another because it is more relevant to the condition. In other words, treatments can be applied, in standard practice, to conditions for which they are not relevant because they are not well understood. Sometimes they work; sometimes, they don’t, but they have a good enough track record to have been accepted.
So we have two considerations:
A. Was it relevant to the condition being addressed?
B. Was it relevant enough to the functional pattern to make a difference? Or did you simply address a “point” (ie, a symptom), leaving “loose ends”, other remaining causes and possibly side effects in their wake, leaving the possibility of a recurrence of the problem?
These are generally not questions that the layman can answer, except for the obvious questions: “Did it work?” and “Were there side effects?” – but these questions should be the central consideration of any health professional.
A. The above, can be repeated, Was the treatment more concerned with the cause (control center) or the effect (symptom)?
B. The above, it can be reaffirmed, did you deal with enough interrelated factors (as diet and exercise are interrelated with heart health) to achieve lasting improvement? Or will the symptom resurface as evidence that the pattern of health hasn’t changed enough, just that his symptom was temporarily suppressed?
There is a reason you still have back pain and it lies in the underlying premise of all of these approaches. That premise goes like this: “The body is a wonderful machine that goes out of tune and something must be done to it, either physically, chemically, energetically, or through manipulation, to get it back in tune.”
As attractive as this logic sounds, and as useful as these approaches may be for certain conditions in certain situations, we know from the results that, in a fundamental sense, it is either not quite right or could be better.
How could the underlying premises be “not quite right”?
Easy. You can adjust the body, but it’s not tight as you put it on because it has its own way of putting on. The body is not a wonderful machine, but a wonderfully self-regulating and self-aware process: the process of you. The key terms here are “self-regulation” and “self-awareness,” in other words just the way you are. Your body automatically regulates your temperature, weight, digestive processes, heart rate, and muscle tension, among other natural processes. Of these examples of self-regulation, the one that is most familiar to us (although it may not seem so at first) is muscle tension; They ALL regulate their muscle tension through a common action. It’s called “movement,” and the master control center for your movements (muscle tension) is your brain, and the master control center for your brain is you.
We learn our movement patterns, starting with creeping, crawling, and walking. Then comes talking, eating with a fork (or chopsticks), riding a bike, playing a musical instrument, typing, and you name it, you learn. All of these actions involve two things: moving in particular ways and feeling the results of those movements. We improve on them through a self-correcting process. We move, feel, and adjust our movements for best results, and that adjustment of our movements is self-regulation (obviously, if you think about it). In that sense, we learn by teaching ourselves, and so, with or without the help of teachers, we learn every skill we have.
Once we learn to do something, how we do it becomes a habit, stored in our brain, again the master control center for our muscles, movements, and senses.
Posture is a kind of habit or persistent pattern maintained by muscular tension controlled by the brain. Now, we know what happens when someone tries to get us to change a habit. I don’t need to say it, but I’ll say it anyway: the habit persists; normal behavior returns.
Muscle tension is a habit formed by repetitive activities, stress and injury. It becomes a memory of how we feel and move that displaces our old memory of how we feel and move, a kind of amnesia. Common therapeutic options attempt to manipulate the body without addressing our “brain-muscle” memory of how we regulate ourselves. They lose part of the way of working of human beings. Stretch a tight muscle, it automatically returns to its tight state by unconscious habit, in days, hours or minutes. Medicating a person, adjusting a spine, releasing the flow of chi, the change is usually temporary because the person returns to their previous state out of habit, out of familiarity. They can’t help themselves because that’s how they know how to be. Your larger life pattern has a self-sufficient resilience, based on memory.
Your muscles obey your brain; They have no mind and no control of their own. That is the crux of the matter. Even if you have surgery, your tension habit remains unchanged (which is one of the reasons back surgery is rarely successful). So I want to dissuade you from the notion that anything done to or for you can conclusively help you with your back pain. Whatever benefit you may gain from manipulative methods (and that includes surgery), the ultimate improvement must include your free control of yourself, apart from involuntary habits, so that you don’t fall back into the automatic, involuntary pattern. Mostly, that is the situation.
Your tense muscles are what are hurting you. Tight muscles are sore muscles, prone to spasm. Other medical conditions treated for back pain relief (with rare exceptions) stem from tight muscles, which compress discs and pinch nerves, sometimes leading to more serious conditions or conditions that do not resolve with standard treatment.
Your brain controls your muscle tension through learned posture and movement habits. Your habits have a “big” effect on your life and the only one who can change your habits is you. If you’re in the driver’s seat, driving, and someone walks up and turns the wheel, what do you do? You resist, reflexively, don’t you?
That’s what your brain does when someone applies some kind of therapy to you. Even if you want the enhancement, it reverts to the way it was used to being out of habit and will continue to do so until you replace the “movement memory” of how it was (bound) with a new memory of how it could be (free of its own habit tensile).
How do you do that? How do you change a habit, even a muscle tension habit? There is only one answer: you learn to get out of it and you have to use proper learning methods to be successful. It is not a mental learning, but a learning of movement, like learning to walk.
That is the domain of the field called “clinical somatic education.”