How to Treat Back Pain

Transcript My name is Eric Sampson, I’m a physical therapist working at Spine and Sports Medicine in Midtown Manhattan. I became a physical therapist basically because I got to enjoy seeing some friends deal with some injuries back when they were in high school, and seeing sports medicine side of things. My sister was also …

Transcript [music] (Start Transcription) [00:04] We typically do a lot of things wrong during the course of the day. Inherently first of all, most of our day is spent with our bodies moving in a forward direction, or the flexed direction. Flexion is described as when the shoulders are moving closer to the knees, when …

Transcript One of the biggest barriers I’m finding in the field, whether it’s the patients and the therapists, is the importance of posture in trying to relieve a patient’s back pain. Posture can be thought of in two ways. There’s posture and the ability to make your posture neutral, which is basically an S shaped …

Transcript Sciatica by definition is going to be a condition where you have either irritation or compression to any of the five nerve roots coming off the spine that make up the sciatic nerve, or compression or irritation to the actual sciatic nerve. So it can be compressed or irritated in a few different places …

Transcript Selecting a good physical therapist is quite similar to selecting a good lawyer or a good accountant. There are good and bad in every profession. The first thing you want to look for is the experience level of the therapist. How long have they been treating that particular type of patient or body part …

Transcript Herniated discs are a very common disorder that we are finding in the clinic. It can vary in terms of the intensity and it can vary in terms of where the symptoms are located. I think the first part of this is to try to understand what the disc is or where it is. …

Transcript “Does back pain last forever?” is a common asked question, and it really depends on what tissue was injured during the event. If you’re injuring a muscle, for instance, a strain to a muscle, muscles have a fair chance of regenerating or healing properly and not returning. If you break a bone, bones, if …

Transcript Spinal stenosis is a relatively common diagnosis that we see in the physical therapy clinic. By definition, spinal stenosis is a narrowing effect, or a narrowing of the spinal column causing a pressure into the spinal cord, or a narrowing of the openings where the spinal nerves travel. Those are called the foramen and …

Transcript It’s very, very difficult to prevent back pain. Unfortunately, we spend somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of our day-to-day in a sitting position for most people. Then you tack on the bending and the lifting and the carrying that goes on during any day. Unfortunately, there is an imbalance of mechanical forces on the …

Transcript Osteoarthritis is a very common disorder in the body, not just in the spine but also your weight bearing joints like your knees, and then your hips commonly as well. Osteoarthritis is basically inflammation of the joint, and depending on what joint you’re talking about, so -itis at the end of any word is …

Transcript I get a lot of questions regarding how to use ice, and when to use ice, and how to use heat, and when to use heat, and they’re very different modalities, and their very different uses. They’re not interchangeable at all. If you’re having an acute back problem or a very unstable back problem, …

Transcript One of the hottest topics, and the thing I get asked about a lot, is “How do I relieve my back pain when I’m at the office? I have an office job. I work somewhere between 12 and 16 hours a day. So, how am I going to relieve the pain at the office?” …

Transcript Yoga and pilates are two wonderful exercise programs that are gaining more and more popularity, I’m finding, and patients often have questions in regards to their yoga and their pilates. Should they be doing it while their back condition is flaring up, and what are the pros and cons. Well, the simple answer is …

Transcript With physical therapy for back pain, there are always a number of options that are available, a number of methods and a number of techniques, from the McKenzie method to the Maitland approach, to Mulligan’s mobilization techniques, and to simple modality treatments like ultrasound, electrical stimulation, and hot and cold. The key to a …

Transcript One of the best part of working in this field for a long time has been trying to figure out for patients which exercises are good and which exercises are bad for their condition. There’s millions of exercises, there’s just so many to count, and unfortunately it really does depend on the condition that …

Transcript One of the big problems that is occurring is the patient population that has to travel or fly frequently for their job, I have some patients that can be flying out of town weekly, or certainly monthly, and the whole process of flying is very difficult on the spine. The spine really wants to …

Transcript Exercise and going back to the gym are very big, important topics. Patients always want to know if they can return, when they can return, what exercises can they return to, which exercises should they not go back to. This is often the one discipline, the one type of thing, that patients tend to …

Transcript There are a lot of causes for shoulder pain. The first thing that you want to understand is that the shoulder is a very complex joint. It is what’s called a ball and socket joint meaning there is a socket which is part of your scapula. Then you have the long arm of your …

Transcript I want us to take a couple of minutes talking about an exercise that is frequently done in the gym setting, and often, unfortunately, done in the physical therapy setting that would be very difficult on a back patient who’s having acute or subacute pain, and that is the piriformis muscle stretching. The piriformis …

Transcript There are a lot of causes of neck pain. The causes of neck pain are often very similar to the causes of lower back pain. For instance, you have your traumatic events. Falling or tripping, slipping. And that can lead to a pain, of course. And then there’s your more common problem with is …

Transcript There’s a number of causes of hip pain. The hip pain, or the hip joint, just like the shoulder joint, is a complicated ball and socket joint, therefore as a result, it relies heavily on the soft tissues, the muscles, ligaments to hold it together, otherwise it can sort of dislocate or separate quite …

Transcript There are a number of causes for lower back pain. Of course, there are traumatic causes. Car accidents or falling, obviously, skiing falling or any falling, is certainly trauma. You also have your, sort of, secondary causes, which is more of a bending or lifting. Maybe, the box was too heavy or maybe, the …

Transcript The half sit up is an exercise that is rarely integrated into a physical therapy program. There’s a number of things that can go wrong during a half sit up. Namely the pressure on the spine, the head and neck position during the exercise, and as well as the timing of doing the exercise. …

Transcript There are a number of causes to upper back pain. The upper back is referred to the area just a little bit below the neck, maybe a few inches below the neck. And the first thing you have to make sure when you’re dealing with upper back pain and the cause of upper back …

Transcript One of the big misunderstandings in our field is the idea of trying to stretch out your hamstring muscles in the presence of acute or sub acute back pain. A lot of patients will offer the idea of wanting to go home and stretch them or having continuously stretching them in order to relive …

Transcript In the physical therapy office we are often asked what exercises to be doing or what not to be doing on your own. And usually we are designing the exercising program for the patient but though often enough they do want to ask can I go back to this. Can I go back to …

Transcript Alright, I wanna spend some time now talking about some great exercises that are often used in the clinic using the stability ball, or the swiss ball, or the exercise balls. The names interchange, but the idea of the ball is much higher-level, advanced exercises. A lot of these exercises can be done on …

Transcript A lot of times in the clinic I am asked by patients, “how do I go home and relax my back when there is discomfort?” And really the key to relaxing your back is going to be to try to encourage the neutral spine or the natural “S” shape of the spine. There is …

Transcript One of my favorite topics when I’m working during the day is when I hear patients talking about how they’re having some back problems and they think that they need to be a lot stronger in their core or in their stomach because of the back pain they’re suffering from. And this is a …

Transcript A lot of time times in physical therapy clinics the patients are coming in with severe or moderate lower back discomfort. And it’s to the point where exercises are not appropriate or indicated until they can calm down some of the muscle spasms and some of the chemical receptors that are all fired up …

Transcript All right, I want to spend a couple of minutes now talking about an exercise called The Plank. The Plank is an exercise used quite commonly in a yoga class and other gym exercise classes. But it’s really a big popular exercise in the physical therapy world, too. The best part about a plank …

Transcript A lot of times in the physical therapy clinic we are asked about different exercises and whether or not they’re good or bad for the back. Depending on whether they recovering from a back injury and where in the recovery they are, there are a lot of exercises that are actually pretty bad for …

Transcript I want to spend a couple of moments now talking about probably the most popular exercise in the physical therapy office for treating back problems associated with disc protrusions, and bulges, and herniations, and that’s called the McKenzie extension in lying or sometimes called the upward dog. Now there are some differences between the …

Transcript Alright, wanna spend a moment now talking about the exercise called Extension in Standing. This is one of the exercises in the Mckenzie Protocol. Mckenzie Protocol is a method of treatment in the physical therapy world and it’s an exercise that you’ve seen people do in general population quite often, where they’re just sort …

Transcript Hi. I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about an exercise called the bird dog. The bird dog is something that’s used frequently in the gym setting, but it’s also used frequently here in the physical therapy setting. It’s a great exercise for mutual strengthening of the spine. Mutual strengthening is often something …

Transcript I want to spend a couple of minutes now talking about a great exercise that can be used for the back patient. It’s a higher level exercise that requires a fair amount of stability and strength so it’s not something I would introduce to a patient who’s just joining us with a lot of …

Transcript The McKenzie Approach is a method of treatment that physical therapists are utilizing more and more in today’s world. It’s an approach that was originally invented by a therapist named Robin McKenzie and he was a therapist that just by luck or by chance observed a major change in a patient’s back condition. Like …

Transcript Hi. I’d like to spend a moment now talking about an exercise called the swimmer. The swimmer is a great exercise used in the clinic, using physical therapy when we’re trying to rehab a back patient. It’s a little less strenuous on the back than some other ones, so I often introduce the exercise …