What is Best for Morning Back Pain?

All of this got me to thinking about what is the best method for relieving morning back pain and what if I get morning back pain every morning versus just having it occasionally. More importantly as an analytical mind I wanted to know what was actually causing my discomfort. I must admit that I did try the over the counter pain reliever – I think it was Advil fast acting – and some of the sharpness in my back did begin to feel a bit better. I passed on the prescription pain relievers for a variety of reasons not least of which is the fact that I wanted to stay awake for the day and typically potent pain killers knock me out for several hours. I even tried some of the Yoga and football stretches but after all my efforts I could still tell that my back just wasn’t right.

When I went to the bathroom; I looked in the full length mirror and I could tell that my posture was off. My rib cage looked like it was about 3 or 4 inches shifted to the right. When I tried stretching to the left this increase the pain or sharp stabbing sensation that was in my right gluteal area. I decided to stop messing with it and see if it would improve on it’s own throughout the day.

After lunch I had a meeting with the head of our marketing division and he noticed that I was struggling with my back and he didn’t say a word, but when we finished our meeting he handed my a business card and said, “Tell them I sent you and they will get you in today, don’t put it off.” I could tell he was serious so I agreed with him and headed back to my office. When I read the business card it was for his Chiropractors office. I didn’t know much about Chiropractic except that a few people had mentioned that they attended one and felt much better. So, I pulled up the handy Google search engine to see what I could find out about Chiropractic and boy was there a bunch of info.

Researching Chiropractic

I started with the old stand by “Wikipeadia”. I have always thought that Wikipeadia was pretty reliable until I read the Chiropractic citation. It felt more like a bickering session between some medical doctors or medical doctor wanabees that don’t like Chiropractic and a hand full of Chiropractors that are trying to keep the citation for Chiropractic as helpful and friendly. I actually took the time to go into the history of the changes and reasons for the changes to the citation for Chiropractic and wow! The moderators at Wikipeadia have their hands full with this entry. Unfortunately, in regards to useful information, Wikipeadia was useless unless you like learning about something from someone who knows nothing about a subject but claims to be an expert. Having experienced similar levels of incompetence in my own profession from self-purported experts I actually felt a bit bad for the Chiropractors that are most likely unaware of what is being reported.

So, I decided to venture into a few of the obviously positive Chiropractic websites: The International Chiropractic Association and The American Chiropractic Association and then into a couple of the obviously negative Chiropractic websites: Quackwatch and see if I could make any sense of it all.

After several hours of reading I can confidently report that the International Chiropractic Association and the American Chiropractic Association present a very well rounded description of Chiropractic including the history, development, current progress, political aspects as well as what to expect from a practitioner which has a broad range depending on the specialty. The Quackwatch and similar site primarily focused on reporting half truths and quite obvious negative propaganda from self-purported experts on the field of Chiropractic who for the most part have no practical experience with Chiropractic and their agenda all appears to be focused on the same point. They state that there are no benefits to chiropractic as a treatment or no benefit that would be greater than any over the counter medication and that there a very rare but serious side affects reported. Therefore, because there are no potential benefits that the potential risk although rare outweighs the non-existent benefit and as such Chiropractic should never be used. It only took me about 2 seconds to Google Chiropractic Testimonials to find hundreds of patients reporting that they experienced tremendous benefits from Chiropractic that other interventions were not able to provide relief for and as such the impetus that Chiropractic is without benefit is incorrect and therefor their conclusions are incorrect. In more closely examining the “rare but serious” side affect I found that the rate of cerebral artery stroke in populations that have virtually no chiropractic care: Brazil and Africa occur at the same rate as in populations with the highest rate of Chiropractic care: USA, Canada, and Australia. That being the case it is very hard to conclude the Chiropractic is causing more of these stokes and a much more plausible explanation being that the stoke has a temporal relationship with the chiropractic treatment (the person was going to have the stroke and they happened to be in the Chiropractic office when it occurred) as even more interestingly the same type of stroke is reported to occur more often in a hair dressing salon than in a Chiropractic office. This of course is ignored as irrelevant because people are not receive a health treatment in the hair salon.

My Conclusions

After spending more than a few hours perusing the various websites and actually researching the things which are being reported negatively about chiropractic is that there is a group of individuals that are either being paid by the medical profession or one of their support organizations to negatively advertise Chiropractic and to draw misguided conclusions based on false propaganda about a naturally occurring event that a handful of Chiropractors had the misfortune to witness.

So, what is Chiropractic All About?

Chiropractic is a health care discipline that’s focused on the spine and the spines supporting structures and their relationship to the nerve system. This relationship plays and important role  in maintaining good health, and leveraging the recuperative power of the body to fix itself naturally and efficiently. The practice of chiropractic focuses on the connection between the position of the spine and health performance which is controlled by the nerve system.

Doctors of Chiropractic look to identify the current position of the spine and correct it’s position toward that of normal or ideal. Very similar to the work of an orthodontist in correcting the position of the teeth from their current position toward a normal or ideal position. In this moment is where all the controversy exists. Many Chiropractors say that the current position and health of the spine gives a predictive value toward the health of the individual patient and correcting the position of the spine can alleviate their health concerns. For example: The nerve roots which exit the spine between the 5th thoracic vertebre and the 7th thoracic vertebre provide the primary and secondary innervation to the stomach. The Chiropractor in evaluating a patients spine identifies distortion of the position of movement in the area of the 5th-7th thoracic vertebra would state that this change in normal position of the spine may relate to dysfunction in the stomach. Whether the patient is aware of a stomach dysfunction or not is irrelevant. Additionally, whether correcting the normal movement and position of the 5th-7th thoracic vertebra alleviates a stomach dysfunction or not again is irrelevant to the Chiropractor. The Chiropractor again like the orthodontist simply identifies the current position and mobility of the spine and works to correct it toward normal. So, where is the issue. The issue comes through how the Chiropractor understands and describes this to the patient and what the patients expectations are in receiving the treatment.

Some Chiropractors pronounce that they are correcting root of all health problems which only occurs from these misalignments of the spine. You can see how this might sound to a medical doctor. However, when the chiropractor has 100 patients that all had a similar pattern of dysfunction in the spine and similar symptomatic presentation that following correction of the spine alleviated the symptoms for all of the patients you can begin to see how they see things. In research terms when evaluating the effectiveness of a specific treatment if the treatment outperforms a placebo (sugar tablet which typically gives a 30% positive result) then the treatment is considered as effective. However, it is very difficult if not impossible to provide a placebo treatment in Chiropractic to compare the results to a treatment group. How do you give a fake Chiropractic Adjustment? As such most research experts report that there is no quality research to demonstrate the effectiveness of Chiropractic. Some Chiropractic studies were designed using a sugar tablet placebo and the Chiropractic treatment outperformed the sugar tablet placebo in every case. However, the research experts point out that a sugar tablet is an effective placebo when the treatment given is another tablet but it is not an effective placebo when the treatment provided is a chiropractic adjustment.

This makes me laugh…seriously belly rolling!!

Why is it that if we compare a pain killing tablet to a sugar tablet for reducing back pain and the sugar table helps 30% and the pain killing table helps 50% we consider this an effective treatment for back pain (although the pain killing tablet reports dozens of side-effects that I promise are worse than back pain). But when we compare a Chiropractic Adjustment to a sugar tablet for reducing back pain and the sugar tablet helps 30% and the chiropractic adjustment helps 85% we consider this an inappropriate placebo and therefore an invalid test result.

To me it says that the Chiropractic adjustment is 35% more effective than the pain killing tablet with no reported side affects and should be the treatment of choice.

The fact is that Doctors of Chiropractic Provide a Treatment which is Distinct from Medical Treatment Options and Pharmaceutical companies hate the fact that the Chiropractic treatment does not include drugs.

After all my research – I decided to follow my colleagues advice and give his chiropractor a call. They were great and my back hasn’t felt this good in years. I now wake up in the morning without the pain and sharpness I was experiencing. So if you are thinking about visiting a Chiropractor in Billings MT or a Spokane Chiropractor for the first time, then you are very likely wondering what kind of results you can anticipate and possibly thinking about some of the same questions I had. Hopefully, I have helped to elaborate some of the issues that you may face in trying to get quality information on Chiropractic. Remember, the reality is that health care is big business and the biggest businesses in teh world (the pharmaceutical companies) didn’t get there by telling you the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth. More likely, they lied and then covered up that lie with another lie, and then had to tell another lie to cover up that one. Unfortunate for most under informed patients, they depend on their medical doctor to provide them with the best possible advice. These days you would be more likely to get quality advice from your local health food store than you would from your medical doctor. Why? They are under strict regulations and heavily influenced by insurance companies to tell you what the big corporations want you to hear. Which is about as far from getting quality health advice as you can possibly get.

When you visit your Doctor of Chiropractic your experience will be enhanced by an inclusive appreciation of chiropractic and the chiropractic adjustment itself. Don’t mistake chiropractic care for medical treatment. Doctors of Chiropractic are not trying to replace medical doctors but rather offering you a method of getting your spine healthy and keeping it healthy. Whatever affect this has on your overall health is a bonus but I can’t imagine in what world a healthier spine would be a bad thing.

In my book I have already reserved a chapter for Chiropractic. Although I am new to the treatment itself. After just a few adjustments I can’t believe I didn’t learn about it sooner.

Keep Smiling!

Eg2002