Suffering from low back pain? Check out this video for solutions to low back pain issues. Wake Forest Chiropractor, Barry Swindler shares information about how Applied Kinesiology can help.

Low back pain is probably the most common reason a person will seek a chiropractor, and today I will go into the common causes of low back pain. There can be many causes and there may be a pathology involved and we may need to do an x-ray, an MRI, CAT scan or other diagnostic tests to figure out exactly the cause of that pain. We are not going to be talking about malignancies or pathologies, but we are going to talk about the most common reasons people have low back pain and why they would seek a chiropractor.

I have the spine here that I want to show you and I’m going to go over some basic anatomy related to the low back. Of course, in the low back we have five lumbar vertebras and in between those vertebra we have discs and the discs are the largest in our back. We also have in this low back area, the muscles the nerves, ligaments and tendons and all those play a part in the function of the low back as well as the rest of body. What we have here is one of the main reasons why people have low back pain, a herniated disc aka bulging or slipped disc whichever you want to call it, but this is where the actual disc has protruded out and is putting pressure on the nerve root right here. Now if a person has this, they’re going to have low back pain and also maybe some sciatica going down their leg or other neurologic conditions. I’m going to show you an x-ray here of a patient of mine that actually has this going on. So with every patient that I have, I will take x-rays to look at their spine just to see what the structure is and see if there’s any degeneration or any other causes of the pain that they’re having. This right here is the lumbar vertebra- you have 5 lumbar vertebras and I’m hoping that you can see this. Right here at the L-5 vertebra and the sacrum, this person has a narrowing of that disc space at this level. I’ve also had an MRI taken of this patient and he has a bulging disc or herniated disc like I showed you on the spine. Getting to ask this patient about his history and finding out what caused it, he said he had a football injury about 10 years previous to this. And this is one of the common things I find in people that have pain or dysfunction in the spine is that they had an injury or something has caused it. At that time, what had happened with him, he had an injury that had caused a spasm in some of his low back muscles. This is where I’m going to be talking about the important role muscles play in the body. That is if you have a strain in this muscle here. This is called the psoas muscle and it connects to the ilium and it produces the iliopsoas and attaches down here on the femur right inside the leg here. It goes up here, I want you to follow this muscle right here and look where it attaches here on the spine. It attaches to the lumbar vertebra. So if this muscle is in spasm, it’s going to be pulling more so on the right than the left causing instability in the spine. We were designed to have balance in the body and the fancy word for that is called homeostasis so we should have an equal amount of pull left or right in the body. But when the muscle spasms, it will be pulling more on one side verses the other thereby causing the vertebra to pull one way. Over time it can allow for the degeneration to take place throughout the spine. For this case it’s at the L-4, L-5 disc level.

Muscle-testing is a big part of my practice. I am certified in the field of applied kinesiology and I had been for about 10 years now (since 2001). Not just for a low back pain but for whiplash, if you’ve see my previous blog post on that. It’s a great blog about whiplash or even carpal tunnel or any other common pain conditions. It’s good to get adjusted by chiropractor to make sure all the segments are moving as far as spinal maintenance and also make sure that the muscles are working properly and none that are weak or in spasm. That’s one of the major diagnostic tools that I use in my office is muscle testing. I’ll lay a patient on the table and I’ll test all the muscles around the pelvis if a person is coming in with low back pain. If I’m suspecting this, I know I’m going to find some weakness in certain muscles of the low back. That is why a lot of people seek out an applied kinesiology chiropractors because they specialize in muscle testing to figure out the cause or reason why they are having pain, whether it be low back pain, headaches, carpal tunnel or what have you. That is one of the common reasons for low back pain; muscle dysfunction that is actually causing instability in the spine not allowing the vertebra to flex or extend or rotate or what have you to give normal motion. Over a period of time, it will allow the disc to degenerate and bulge and protrude on the nerve which is going to give you pain. So I correct the muscle dysfunction, adjust the spine so the spine is moving the way it is supposed to and the pain goes away. Left untreated, this disc will eventually degenerate to the point where there’s nothing I can really do to help them. That will be a surgical condition then. So I like to catch that before it gets to the surgery level to hopefully try to restore the function in the spine, get them out of pain and return them back to health.