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What Is Mechanical Low Back Pain? It’s More Common Than You Think
After an accident, you may experience persistent back pain, but you may still wonder to yourself if you’re just imagining it. What is back pain, really? How do we define it? As one of the most common types of back pain, mechanical low back pain arises from trauma (either chronic or sudden) such as a fall, a motor vehicle accident, twisting, prolonged poor posture, mental stress, fatigue, disc extrusion (also known as a slipped disc, rupture, or disc herniation), sometimes degenerative disc disease (also called arthritis), aging, congenital defects, poor flexibility, etc. Causes such as infection, hormonal problems, broken bones, systemic disease, and tumors require serious medical intervention but are very rare and are beyond the scope of this article. Acute low back pain is defined as activity intolerance due to lower back or back-related leg symptoms of less than three months’ duration. Chronic low back pain, therefore, is defined as pain/problems lasting more than three months.
It is next to impossible to determine exactly which tissue is the cause of the low back pain. It could be muscle, ligament, disc, tendon, joint, and/ or other connective tissue. They all can produce similar symptoms and commonly present as pain on one side of the back or across the back. It may radiate into the buttock or into the thigh. Quite often, it will be accompanied by painful cramping of the muscles called a muscle spasm. Furthermore, medical research has shown that X-rays are little help in determining the cause of low back pain except in rare cases such as severe trauma. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is also ineffective — for example, 2 out of 3 people showing disc abnormalities on an MRI have no pain, and 1 in 3 people with disc bulges also report no pain. Health care professionals often call low back pain a “pain in search of a pathology.” This means that a patient’s medical tests will be negative or a test will produce a false positive. The cause may be unknown, but you still need help finding a solution to your pain. A PT can help promote healing in your soft tissue to ultimately help heal and eliminate pain.
Regardless of the duration of mechanical low back pain, the cause is likely to be damaged soft tissue(s), which can stimulate nerves and produce pain.
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