SNEAKY LOW BACK PAIN

**highlighting the back pain that is on one side, moves around, hard to fix

We all seem to get it at some point and often it comes back. The tricky part about low back pain is that it can have many different root causes. It can come directly from the spine - an irritated joint or disc - or tight muscles that compress the spine causing tightness and pain. Often it’s a combination and then we play the chicken or the egg game.

I get patients often who have had one sided back pain that kind of moves around and never gets better for that long. It can shift down to the pelvis and into the glute/buttock or you can have SI joint pain. This is often due to a biomechanics issue due to short and weak muscles in the front of the hip - psoas, rectus femoris, TFL - but we feel the pain in the back part of our body.

Postural awareness and understanding all the players in the core and hip helps as well because then it does not seem as scary and you can learn to manage it.

If you have had low back pain, had it treated for symptoms in the back but you never feel like it’s totally fixed, then the tightness in the front of the pelvis/hip might be the root problem so treatment is different than if the root cause was in the back. These people are often active, may sit for work, drive a lot and/or does a lot of core by lifting legs in the air. But that’s just a generalization.

If this sounds like you, then we should talk. :)