Anti-Aging Information

Your physician can learn a great deal by lifting your lower leg while your thigh is flexed up toward your chest. This test is called Lesegue's Sign, named after the Frenchman who first discovered another way of torturing you. This maneuver stretches the third lumbar nerve root as it meanders out through your sciatic notch. It is an easy diagnostic test your doc can do while you are lying flat on your back, which is usually your position of
choice anyway and the extent of movement you'll want to undergo.

In this age of legalistic medicine, your physician will most likely order front and side views of your lumbar spine. These X rays are low on the yield side both in specificity and sensitivity. Lumbar spine films are one way of early on detecting forward slippage (spondylolisthesis) of one of your lumbar vertebrae over another or an arch defect (fracture) posteriorly without actual slippage (spondylolysis). Your physician can also see "lipping"that is, growths around individual vertebrae due to osteoarthritis or narrowing of your intervertebral disc spaces from this or an earlier degenerative process or injury.

In the majority of cases, you may have an abnormal X ray or, at worst, an X ray that shows chronic degenerative changes of the spine from aging. The best treatment is still usually conservative: positioning yourself comfortably with your legs flexed over some pillows and taking a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory potion such as ibuprofen in doses of 600 or 800 milligrams, four or three times a day, respectively, that is, if your stomach can tolerate it.

You may require other medications such as muscle relaxants to reduce swelling and spasm. Your physician may choose any of several other stronger options, including some major pain pills such as Tylenol with codeine for when the pain really gets bad, as it often does at night. There are times when these medicines can really make the difference. Remember to reinforce pain-free intervals rather than the pain-full moments. Put simply, take your pain medications regularly, and not just when you hurt during one of these sieges.

During your first week with a pulled back, your physician may choose to emphasize pain relief, rest, and comfort (survival) care. By the second week, he or she may send you to physical therapy for hot packs, massage, electrical stimulation, and ultrasound. The touch and caring of a physical therapist or massage therapist can do amazing things toward speeding your healing process, especially as therapy relaxes the spasm going throughout your body without any sense or direction. Now is the time to have whoever is giving you care to attack the spasm in the extensor muscles of your back by stretching them: using contrast therapy (ice and heat), giving you low-voltage electrical stimulation, or employing low-weight, high-repetition resistance exercises. As one doctor notes, "emphasize strengthening the extensors to offset the world we live in putting us in flexion most of the day." Seeing a chiropractor is often very helpful.

Now might be the time to return to theory 1 and to think about the stressors in your life and healthy ways for relieving them. Also consider beginning a home back-strengthening program with weight lossif necessaryto further minimize degenerative changes perhaps responsible for this whole vicious cycle in the first place. Consider, too, that the weakest link in the back structure may be your abdominal muscles. These may have gone to pot (literally) since you last needed them for high school football. Oh, those sixties.

Once your acute back pain subsides, throwing in different types of tummy crunches once or twice a day to strengthen your jelly belly could do a lot toward rebuilding your back in a healthy body, and a happy spirit.