The Problem With Going To See The Doctor For Low Back Pain
I have enormous respect for every good and sincere medical practitioner. Their years of training, hard work and dedication to their profession is awesome. But with the best will in the world a ten minute consultation in the Doctor’s Office is hardly enough time to perform the kind of thorough investigation which is required to establish the root cause of someone’s low back pain.
In my own experience, over many years, the consultation usually went something like this :-
‘Hello Doctor’
‘Good morning - take a seat … What can I do for you today?’
‘Well, I’ve got this stiffness and soreness in my back .. just here’
‘Oh, sorry to hear that. How long have you had it for?’
‘About 3 days now - I was just bending down to pick up a bag of shopping and I felt a sharp stab of pain, and then the stiffness and soreness came on’
‘Any other pain anywhere else?’
‘No Doctor, just here’
‘Very well. Well you appear to have a soft tissue injury. Here’s a prescription for some Ibuprofen Tablets. Take these and if you still have a problem in a weeks time come back and see me’
‘Thank You Doctor’
And off I would go. For the next few days I would hobble around taking great care not to aggravate the injury, moving very carefully, not lifting heavy objects. The Ibuprofen tablets would help to some degree, but unfortunately they have a tendency to mask the underlying pain, which produces a premature sense of healing, and so I would begin to move again in a way which caused further damage and prolonged the eventual recovery.
However, eventually the injury would heal, and I would go back to the normal routine, and the normal ways of doing things.
Now, the problem is that I had learned nothing from the experience.
- I didn’t really understand what had caused the injury in the first place
- The Doctor prescribed pain killing medicine, but did not explain how or why the injury had occurred
- I went away with no knowledge of how to prevent it happening again
After so many experiences like this I eventually decided that I needed to understand a lot more about the cause, treatment and prevention of low back pain, but it took me over 20 years of intermittent suffering to reach this state of mind. The problem is that when a back injury clears up, you just want to get on with the rest of your life, and catch up with what you have been missing whilst you were ill. You don’t really want to do loads of research into the causes of low back pain, because, lets face it, until fairly recently most ordinary people thought that medical matters were exclusively for Doctors to understand and sort out.
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