Causes and Treatment For Back Pain

Causes and Treatment

Transcript

Low back pain is one of the most common ailments patients come into our office for. Most people during the course of their life will wind up experiencing low back pain at one point in time or another. It could be just from waking up on the wrong side of the bed to falling, or to lifting something heavy that they're not used to. It could also be from a sports injury or a car accident. It's a very common ailment. Most low back pain issues can be treated conservatively. I would say 95% of my patients do not need surgical intervention for low back pain. Obviously it depends on the diagnosis as to what the pain generator is that's causing the low back pain. But at the end of the day, we do a full evaluation. We do the appropriate studies and come to a diagnosis and based on the diagnosis, we use the latest techniques available to reduce that pain, hopefully to get rid of that pain, without surgical intervention. If after all the conservative management treatments fail, then we will consider surgical intervention if necessary.

Causes and Treatment

Symptoms

Causes Overview

Scenarios of Causes

Kidney Stones

Arterial Disease

Cancer

Risk Factors of Age

Risk Factors of Obesity

So, what's the data on obesity? Because we always hear, well, if you'll just lose some weight, your back pain will be so much better. The answer to that is fairly nebulous and that is, is that probably patients who are morbidly obese, if they do lose some weight, will do better. And there are certain pathologic processes where people have the slips and their spines that if they lose weight that they will do better because they'll have less sort of traction to make the slip go. But it's not a one to one correlation and that again is one of the major problems that it's not just who here take these pills for two weeks and your urinary tract infection will be gone. Obesity is a predisposing factor, but it's interestingly enough, not necessarily as strong as what your average citizen would like to believe and just losing weight may not make you back pain all that much better. Which again makes it frustrating because if we are overweight we should be losing some weight and doing better for other reasons too. Not just simply for the back pain. Patients who have obesity and are obese who come to surgery have certain risk factors and interestingly enough, most of those risk factors are not the outcomes of the surgeries. The outcomes of the surgeries generally, and you can always find a paper here or there that might say otherwise, but the vast majority of the papers are saying that your weight doesn't matter in terms of your outcome for any of these things that get operated on. But you risk factors for developing a blood clot in the legs and pneumonia, a urinary tract infection might be higher and certainly if you're morbidly obese, then airways and pneumonias and things, really those things come to the fore. Those things are really important. It doesn't mean you can't have a good outcome from surgery, but you're at a higher risk of developing a complication because of your weight. And same thing is true for instance, if you're diabetic, you have a higher risk. So we can try to mitigate those risks, waiting for people to lose weight. We can get their sugars under better control in case you're diabetic, and that's the way we look at it in medicine, we tried to lessen the risk.

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Causes and Treatment

Causes and Treatment Transcript

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Causes and Treatment

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