Healing Low Back Pain and Neck Pain

By Sachin Bansal and S. Kumar, M.D.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

The author of this self-help text is a board certified physician specializing in spine care. He has been in practice for almost a decade taking care of thousands of patients suffering from chronic pain.

CONTENT:

The purpose of this short book is to provide easy at-home-remedies available for neck and low back pain during the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare options for individuals with non-urgent medical issues (such as neck and low back pain) are significantly limited during this time due to utilization concerns. Many individuals who are typically under a physician-directed program to manage their pain find themselves quarantined at home without pain management options.

The following text will provide you with some simple methods to attack neck and back pain. Some very easy stretches and exercises are presented. The use of modalities such as heat and ice are discussed. The controversial and debated topic of medical marijuana in the management of pain is also explored.

• Language: English
• Publisher: S. Kumar, M.D.
• Release date: Apr 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393194514

Book preview

Chapter One:  Low Back Pain

Most common causes:  Muscle Pain and Arthritis

Anyone who decided to purchase and read this likely has two things in common:

1) You are most likely stuck in your home, a prisoner to COVID-19, the coronavirus.   

2) Your neck or your back hurts. 

In your mind you are repeating to yourself, It’s a disc.  It’s a disc.  It’s a disc.  It’s a disc...  I have found over time that when the vast majority of individuals suffer an episode of back pain or neck pain they automatically believe the culprit to be a disc problem.  Sometimes this is because they have had an MRI in the past and they were informed that they had a degenerative disc and these haunting words never left their mind.  Sometimes this is because they have friends or family that have suffered from a disc issue in the past and their symptoms seem very similar.   

But is your pain secondary to a disc problem?  Probably not.    The majority of back pain is what we refer to as mechanical.  While our knee joints, hip joints, shoulder joints are large singular joints our spines are comprised of many different joints.  In fact, each level of the spine consists of there different joints.  There are 26 vertebrae in the average human body (with some uncommon variations).  Each of these levels consists three joints including the disc (each disc is one joint) and the facet joints on either side of the disc.  If you do the math, that’s a lot of joints.  That’s a lot of moveable parts.  If you are a car buff you know that moveable parts can cause problems.  The more parts in a structure, whether that structure is the human body or a motor vehicle, the greater the possibility that one of those parts can cause a problem.  With all these elements in constant motion it is no surprise that the back can ache for a variety of reasons most of which do not involve an injury or serious