Back Pain is Treatable - Health Channel

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Back Pain is Treatable |

Back pain is absolutely treatable, affirms Dr. Melissa Guanche, Physiatrist at Baptist Health Neuroscience Center.

Physical therapy is one of the alternatives that the specialist explains to the patients, who can expect their complete recovery. “Physical therapists help patients to understand their bodies and teach them ways to self-manage in order to prevent further injury. With the proper therapy, it is possible to expect to be pain- free,” she says.

Transcript

After a common cold there’s back pain and sometimes it doesn’t go away completely but it’s treatable right? Back pain is absolutely treatable if you can’t manage it on your own if symptoms persist come see a doctor there’s lots of things that we can try physical therapy like I’ve been saying is key and patients can expect complete recovery it depends on what happens what kind of injury you have and it depends on how you felt before your back pain if you’ve had back pain all your life and it’s just worse now well maybe you can expect going back to where you were before and a little better improving your function restoring your function that’s how I like to see it now if you’ve never had back pain and you have an injury and you come in and we diagnosed you and we get the proper therapy I think it’s you can absolutely expect to one day be pain-free again and this is just with the use of short term medications some physical therapy and becoming responsible and knowing what stretches and exercises you need to do at home to keep your trunk and your core strong to prevent recurrence of the injury. Now we spoke about physical therapy and I want to be more specific for our viewers out there of traditional types of physical therapy and the realistic goal of getting back to a hundred percent because that’s what everybody wants. Absolutely everybody wants to get better everybody wants to go back to 100% number one you need to be patient correcting your back correcting your posture strengthening your core these are lifelong processes so you can’t expect to get better after two sessions or three or four sessions of physical therapy I can’t emphasize enough on finding a physical therapist that is familiar with your condition so if you have a back injury speak to your doctor about going to a physical therapist who treats back injuries all the time you may have had a great experience with a therapist who did the rehab after your total knee replacement but that might not be the best therapist for your back condition you want to know and understand your condition in my practice I spend so much time grabbing spine models and and pictures of the back and just showing patients this is what I think is going on this is gonna make it better this is gonna make it worse so I make them involved in the process they need what they can and can’t do and physical therapists just you know that’s exactly their role they help patients understand their bodies and teach them ways to self-manage so they prevent further injury.

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