What can a person do to improve back pain at home?

I cover many things here – including importantly various causes of back pain, different treatments and very under-appreciated home recommendations that can really help people with pain.

Back pain can be caused from so many different things that it’s impossible to know what would help in a specific case. It’s important to know what is causing the back pain so that the cause of the pain can be helped or corrected.

Causes Of Back Pain

Back pain might be caused from a local musculoskeletal issue ranging from problems within the small joints that allow vertebrae to move to torn spinal ligaments, discs, the sacroiliac joint (what most people refer to as hips), hips, muscular issues in the area, etc. At times the back pain is caused from past injuries. Often there may have been a more recent injury.

In other cases it might be that people have developed chronic pain that is a problem in and of itself. This may occur with musculoskeletal problems that did not heal properly because of the person not getting appropriate care that improved the healing process – like chiropractic care and physical therapy for example.

The pain can also develop without as significant of a musculoskeletal problem. This is seen when a person has certain neurological problems as an example.

Both intermittent acute and chronic back pain may occur in a person that has underlying health problems that drive inflammation. This could be so many different things ranging from chronically elevated blood sugar/insulin and autoimmune conditions among other issues.

In some cases, it could be a potentially very serious problem like an aneurysms, kidney problems, an infection, cancer, and others. I have seen several aneurysms and kidney problems present as back pain in my practice. I have also seen many acute compression fractures in people with back pain, some that did not report what would seem to be enough trauma to cause the fracture.

In short, go see a knowledgeable healthcare practitioner to find out what is causing the pain first.

Lifestyle Factors That People Can Improve To Improve Their Pain

Here are a couple of things to better understand pain that help people understand things that might reduce it.

Local back pain (and other pain) can be reduced with movement and other types of input into the nervous system.

This is why in many cases things like an appropriately used TENS unit might help. I do not think it’s a great idea for people to try to figure this out on their own. I also don’t think it’s something you want to rely upon for pain.

Movement based activities and treatments reduce pain.

These include appropriate use of stretching, exercise, and chiropractic care.

Conversely a sedentary lifestyle causes more pain.

Movement is critically important to reduce pain.

Sleep loss will drive more pain. Stress will also drive more pain in people. Working on improving these two things is important in reducing pain.

Diet can increase pain. Many people are driving more pain without realizing it due to different lifestyle factors including their diet.

Far too many sugars/carbohydrates in many people driving high insulin levels and inflammation. This is a big issue and it’s exceptionally common.

The over-consumption of ‘vegetable’ oils. These are actually extremely processed seed oils many of which are very high in omega 6 fats which cause a lot of problems including inflammation. Omega 6 fats essentially oppose the anti-inflammatory omega 3 fats that are found in fish oil from cold water fish among other sources.

So I would recommend seeing a healthcare practitioner that understand pain, how to evaluate back pain, treat it if necessary, and make recommendations of these you can do on your own to improve it is very important.