Back Pain and its recovery

As mentioned in the previous chapter that the pain could be different for both causes and sources of pain. To tell or procast the recovery of the pain, we should first clarify both sources and causes of pain.

Sources of pain, we are talking about where is the pain?, usually can be pointed out but sometimes they are not right there where you can touch. The most common source of pain often appears in the muscle bulb where you can touch, point or pinch. With out visceral organs' problems, the pain in muscles can be recovered with in 3 days . In the worser cases, you would have no pain in a week.

Unfortunately, not so many back pain or low back pain cases have a sole source of muscle pain alone. They are often involved with some degrees of skeletal (bone) problems which occured due to internal or external forces or we described that "mechanical causes"are involved. Would you believe that a sneezing can be "Internal force" that cause problems to your back. It's often found that one could injured his or her back while sneezing in a posture of bending forward especially in an early of life (18-30 yo.). An akward posture or a poor postural control would be another source of internal force that give the pain to your back. The very regular mistakes while handling heavy objects are back bending, neck extending, no legs' movements. These mistakes often cause back pain both gradually and suddenly depends on the heaviness of the load or objects as well as physical fitness of the handler.

External forces are all forces in surrounding environments for example a dropping objects, pulling or dragging from your friends, hitting by a car or some objects ..etc. directly to your back. All of these forces can simultaneously send the pain right to your back muscles as well as some degrees of injuries to your vertebral joints (back bone joints). The some degrees of injuries taken by the vertebral joints might not show any sign of pain but could be accumulated and will reveal the problems after years of working period. But we would not know if it is a hidden or a long term cause since we could not notice the pain at the first place.

Obvious and accute pain can be a usual result of taking vigorous force both from internal and external, where you can find that the recovery might not be differed. In the case that the pain is related to musculoskeletal (muscle and bone), its recovery would extend further for a week or 2 weeks longer than the muscular pain alone.

However, musculoskeletal problems involved with nerves' injury would leave the pain on your back, buttocks, legs for a longer period. It can be several weeks (2-4 weeks) or several months to be pain free. For the worsen cases, you would experience numbness, lost sense of temperature/touch/pressure, weaknes of muscles in the nerve supplied areas (most commons are lateral side of the thighs, calves, buttocks, toes, shins). In some cases, a lost of bowel control, a change in bowel habit or a constipation would also happen. As the vertebral injuries cause a complex damage to your body, in this case you need to allow even more time to be recovered. It might take several months or a year!

Taking care of your back before it has problems seems to be the best thing to do !

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Back Pain - is it all the same?

An often asked question is "How long does it take to recover from back pain?" The answers are not the same for all cases since the pain on the back often has different causes which make different symptoms.

To make it easy to understand, site of pain in general would related to the injuries or damages occured to bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, tendons, ligaments, lymp nodes, internal organs. However, the most common case of back pain usually related to muscles, bones, nerves, spinal cord and internal organs respectively. This is because our human body has a thick layer of back muscles so when your back got injured it often cause damages to muscles and bone as called "musculoskeletal problem" then it could effect the spinal nerve roots if there are a serious physical damages such as a fracture, a translation or dislocation of the vertebral bodies (back bones) that could injures the spinal nerve root and spinal cord. Internal organs is often involved as a cause of back pain when they are alone malfunction or having diseases and injuries. On the other hand, internal organs can also become malfunction or not working properly when vertebral bodies and spinal nerves are injured then it in return would worsen the pain in the back as a secondary cause.

To cope with the pain, you need to have a clearer understanding of musculoskeletal system as well as your internal or visceral organs functioning in relation to how it's reflected to the nerves root or spinal nerves that supplied them. Furthermore, you need to have some knowledge on how to work and do your daily activities properly as we talk about "Good postures could safe your back". There are tons of information on "how to take care of your back?" on the internet but not every surfer could follow the suggestions probably because they don't really understand the nature of pain, sources of pain, progression of the injuries and pain behaviour, etc.

That why we need to learn more about our body and correct your posture to prevent the worsen or chronic back pain.