Okay let’s go over some of the red flags here one by one let’s start with infection. Okay so there’s several red flags and these are things that you at home can think about if you have back pain if you have any of these things if you have fever chills night sweats waking up completely drenched that could be a sign of infection or some other cause if you have trauma if you’re very elderly if you have osteoporosis you may deal with a fracture if you have some weight loss associated with some of your fever chills and night sweats and you’re not really thinking about that that may be an underlying cancer if you have history of cancer you don’t want to just let the back pain go if it keeps increasing especially if you have severe pain that wakes you up from a deep sleep that can be also a frightening thing another thing you want to talk about is if you’re having neurologic injury that continues or persists if your weakness in your legs has a difficult time now standing up from a chair and that hadn’t happened before you have difficulty walking and tripping if you have numbness around your genitalia we call that saddl anesthesia if you ever lose your urine and you didn’t mean to and that’s never happened to you or your bow those are all signs of something that could be pinching all the nerves so either call that cauda equina syndrome or conus medullaris syndrome depending on where it is in your lower back but those are things that need to be addressed emergently. And what kinds of cancer are you talking about with back pain. There’s multiple types of cancer a lot of times you have a metastatic disease that goes to the spine predominantly versus primary tumors in the spine and tumors and metastatic cancer means that it spreads from a different region either prostate breast kidney things like that.