A physical dysfunction occurs when your body posture and/or mechanics are no longer optimal, or “normal,” and are now creating excessive wear and tear on your muscles, ligaments, bones, and joints. This can show up simply as pain, or it can develop into a medical condition, such as scoliosis, a joint condition, disc herniation, and more.
Imagine a puppet. If you pull one string up tight and leave the others loose, the body will change posture. The same is true of your muscles. The tighter, shorter ones will pull your body out of its normal position and the result will be a curved or crooked posture.
This is what’s happening to our bodies when the muscles are out of balance. The changes may be subtle, but we’re walking around in twisted ways and, eventually, we’ll experience pain and/or suffer an outright condition, such as a herniated disc or sciatica. Vertebrae are pulled to the right or left, straining the spine. Hips are pitched forward or backward, forcing the lower back into an unnatural position. Shoulders round, pulling on the upper back and neck. These joints and bones are then forced to move every day in these strange, tilted positions.
When you have a physical dysfunction, your body will try to compensate. In other words, it “works around” whatever the dysfunction is in order to do what you want it to do, whether that be a particular exercise or a particular task. For example, if you sit for many hours of the day (like many people do), your hip flexors—those muscles on the front of your hips that pull your knees up—become short and tight.
This tightness can “pull” the top of the pelvis on one or both sides downward, which creates excessive curvature in your lower back. Then you have constant strain placed on the muscles of the lower back, but that’s nothing compared to the uneven compression placed on your discs as a result of the excess curvature.
This is just one example of how physical dysfunctions develop and wreak havoc on our bodies. As someone with back, neck, or sciatic pain, it is critical that you understand this process, as it holds the key to you getting lasting relief and also knowing how to prevent or better deal with future flare-ups.
How Physical Dysfunctions Create “Conditions” and Pain
If you regularly carry a wallet, cell phone, or other object in your pants pocket, try the following exercise. Put on a pair of fairly snug-fitting jeans that have a back pocket and sit in a chair. Notice your body position. Then stand up, put the wallet or cell phone in the back pocket and sit back down again. See how your body position shifts ever so slightly? The hip on the same side as the wallet or phone will rise up a little bit, and your shoulders and neck will adapt to compensate.This is the same thing your body does when lifting a heavy bag, though the effect is a bit subtler.
Here’s another demonstration you should do in front of a full-length mirror or with a friend who can take a photograph of you. Stand with your side to the mirror (or camera). Next, place your hands on your hips. Notice how your index finger and thumb rest on your hips.
If you were to put a carpenter’s bubble level on the area covered by your index finger and thumb, would you be “level”? Ideally, you want to be. But if your index finger and thumb lean toward the front of your body, your hips lean too far forward. This puts you at much greater risk for back pain. Similarly, if your finger and index finger lean toward the back of your body, your hips lean too far backward, which also can lead to back pain.
Or try this. Face the mirror, or the camera, with your hands at your sides and then stand to the side. Look at yourself in the mirror or in the photos. Do your fingers rest on the side of your leg or do they rest more toward the front, on the big leg muscles called the quadriceps?
If someone looking at the front of your body can see your knuckles, this is a problem. The correct position is for your hands and knuckles to rest at the sides of your body—clearly visible to someone to your right or left, but not to someone who is facing you.
If your hands rest in the forward-rotated position, also known as “forward-rolled shoulders,” it means many of the muscles in the front of the upper body are much shorter and tighter (not always, but typically stronger) than the corresponding muscles in the back. People who spend a lot of time driving and have to reach for the steering wheel, or who sit in front of a computer where the keyboard is too far away, often show this type of imbalanced pattern.
The Slippery Slope Toward Back Pain
When a physical condition isn’t corrected, the body starts to break down. Usually the result is pain, which can exist on its own without signaling any particular condition. However, conditions also arise as a result of the same lengthy wear and tear.Tight muscles can pull the vertebrae out of alignment, pinching a nerve or creating a herniated disc. Physical dysfunctions can pressure joints and, over time, stress them to the maximum until they develop inflammation and injury.
Overworked muscles can go into spasm, causing pain and forcing the body into physical dysfunction.
The pain from these conditions is often triggered by some sort of activity, such as heavy lifting, gardening, cleaning, or sports. Suddenly there is pain, triggered by a muscle spasm, strain, or pull, or by a pinched nerve or inflamed joint.
That’s why most people believe they have “thrown out” their backs or suffered the injury because of a singular occurrence. The condition shows up immediately after the activity, so the belief is that the activity caused the condition. However, this isn’t the case. The activity may have triggered the pain, but it was the long months or years of uneven muscle use that actually created the condition that made the pain possible.
Back Pain Type #1:
Nerve Based Back Pain
Once the physical dysfunction and/or condition exists, pain can be triggered suddenly and without warning at any time. When you have a muscle or bone that is a hair’s length away from a nerve, it doesn’t take much for either of them to intrude on the nerve’s space—irritating it and causing you nervebased back pain.
Incidentally, one of the main reasons so many back treatments fail, work only temporarily, or have inconsistent results is because most treatment approaches focus on the latter steps of this process. There are many ways to make pain go away temporarily, but all such relief measures don’t address the underlying causes of the pain.
For example, surgery may claim to “correct a herniated disc,” but it does nothing to address the physical dysfunctions and muscle imbalances that caused the disc to herniate in the first place. This is why a number of people who get back surgery end up getting repeat back surgery. One disc gets “fixed,” only to have another become damaged a year or two later as a result of the same muscle imbalances that were never corrected. And that’s if the disc was really what was causing the pain to begin with.
Rather than get a new bucket to catch water leaking from a roof, it makes a lot more sense to just fix the hole in the roof. The same can be said for back pain. Find the source of the problem and all the “downstream” issues end up disappearing on their own—including the pain!
Back Pain Type #2:
Tissue Based Back Pain
When a physical dysfunction or condition persists uncorrected, the various tissues in your body—namely your muscles, tendons, and ligaments—get overworked incredibly quickly. Normally, these tissues are strained only when you use them. Under these kinds of conditions, your soft tissues can tolerate enormous usage completely pain free.
But if you have a physical dysfunction, you’re actually straining those soft tissues virtually every second of your waking day.
For example, if your hips are misaligned due to a muscle imbalance or trigger point, the muscles surrounding your misaligned hips get overworked and abused. If you’re sitting in a chair under these conditions, your muscles, tendons, and ligaments have to work overtime to compensate for your physical dysfunction. This quickly becomes excess usage (the “too much” problem we mentioned previously) and your body rebels by making you feel pain.
Why Didn’t My Doctor Tell Me About This?
You may be wondering why your doctor never told you about muscle imbalances; trigger points; the excess, deficiency, and stagnation; and the mindbodydiet concepts.
Certainly he or she is an educated person. Do doctors not know about them? And how can that be?
The fact is, in the United States, and most other “modern” countries, the medical schools tend to focus on treating the symptoms, and the solutions they favor usually include pharmaceuticals or surgery.
If you suffer a heart attack, for instance, because of a blocked artery, doctors will focus on opening that artery (either with surgery or medication) and give little attention to why the artery became blocked in the first place. Then, to help you avoid another blocked artery, they’ll prescribe drugs, rather than investigate the “why” behind your condition.
Most of our medical professionals work very hard for their credentials, and they tend to work equally as hard in their practices. It takes an enormous amount of time and effort just to stay current with all the advances in the medical world, including new drugs, new treatments, and new technologies.
Unfortunately, insurance companies put enormous time- management pressures on doctors. They only have a few minutes to make you feel better—and a few minutes are nowhere near enough to identify the underlying causes of your pain, let alone develop a comprehensive treatment plan.
At the same time, pharmaceutical companies are creating billions of dollars’ worth of profit each year, and so the focus is not on prevention, but instead on how to sell more drugs and what new drugs can be developed.
And while the typical doctor’s visit isn’t long enough to really solve a back-pain problem, it is long enough to prescribe the latest and greatest pill—a pill that may temporarily reduce pain but doesn’t get rid of the underlying causes of the pain, and that is usually not without serious negative side effects.
Unfortunately, this sets up a vicious cycle. When the underlying causes of back pain aren’t addressed, you end up right back in the doctor’s office a few months later with the exact same problem you had previously. And the whole process repeats itself.
The drug companies continue to make money with each back-pain episode you experience. In a misguided attempt to save money, insurance companies feel like they’ve succeeded because they’ve kept doctors’ visits very brief—so they can pay them less.
Of course, when you don’t actually solve what’s causing your back pain, you end up having to go back to your doctor repeatedly. This costs insurance companies more in the long run, but they’re so used to thinking about short-term profits that they often don’t look at it from any other perspective. Fortunately for you, there are other approaches to resolving back pain that do not rely on surgery or potentially harmful medications.
Keep in mind that muscle imbalances and trigger points are not technically diseases. Most doctors and the medical schools that train them focus only on eliminating diseases. And since most forms of back pain aren’t technically diseases, many medical doctors aren’t familiar with these alternative approaches.
It’s Not Your Fault
If you’re thinking, “What’s the matter with me? Why didn’t I notice this was happening?,” stop. Don’t be hard on yourself. You didn’t notice because your body made the changes without you being aware of them. You may have experienced some aches and pains, but who hasn’t, right?
Besides, most of us are hard-pressed to find the time to really focus on our health until our bodies literally demand it. It isn’t your fault that you’ve suffered back pain. The good news is now that you’re taking a proactive approach to your condition, you’re going to learn what you need to know to take better care of your own body, get rid of the pain, and finally get your life back. This knowledge will last the rest of your life, helping you make adjustments when you need to, so you’ll reduce your chances of ever having to experience back pain again.
Remember, we all have these imbalances, and the sooner you identify and address them, the sooner you’ll be on your way to freedom from pain. Later in this book I’ll teach you exactly how you can do just that.
Your Mind and Your Diet:
Two Other Potential Sources of Back Pain
While problems in the body tend to be the ones most doctors and health care professionals focus on, the mind and the diet play a much bigger role than most realize. In fact, I personally feel, and more and more research is suggesting, that these other areas may be keys to improving back pain. It’s quite easy to have issues with “too much,” “too little,” and blood circulation or body energy that’s “too slow” because of
your emotional and dietary life.
0 komentar:
Post a Comment