Low Back Pain Conditions Treatment Smithtown NY

Our lives today are so sedentary, we just don’t move as much as we should. The advent of computers and technology, while amazing for productivity, has conditioned us not to use our bodies the way they were designed. Constant sitting and scrolling load our lower back in an awkward and misaligned way, contributing to a loss in the vital spinal curves of our neck and lower back. These abnormal positions shift the balance throughout the lower back and pelvis, putting wear and tear on our spines and weakening the muscles that keep us upright and strong. It’s no wonder low back pain is the #1 cause of disability in the U.S. Never has chiropractic care been so crucial for our overall wellness and quality of life.

When you load the spine unevenly – which most of us do through daily habits like sitting, crossing our legs, leaning to one side, and even driving – it weakens our bones and joints. This degeneration affects our nerves’ ability to function, sending pain signals and causing dysfunction throughout the body. In addition, unbalanced stress on the joints will wear down our spinal discs, which act like little cushions or shock absorbers between the vertebrae and protect each spinal nerve. As the disc gets thinner, it loses its protection potential putting more pressure on the nerves, which become inflamed. This inflammation creates pain signals, sometimes shooting pain through the butt and into the legs.

Disc herniations, bulges, or degeneration of discs can affect the adjacent spinal nerve resulting in numbness, tingling, or loss of function through that nerve. You can even experience bladder and bowel dysfunction. Digestive disorders from a lower back problem are common if the nerves that exit from the lumbar spine are affected. Anything a nerve controls – whether it’s a joint, muscle, sensation, or a central organ, including the digestive or reproductive organs – can be affected by a lower back problem. It goes way deeper than just pain.

Only 10% of our nervous system actually gives us signals of sensation, including pain. In order to feel pain in your body, you must have 65% or more dysfunction in the nerve. So by the time you have pain, at least two-thirds of your nervous system is dysfunctioning. That means the organs supplied by those nerves are not functioning very well, creating a ripe ground for disease.

Symptoms like pain, numbness, and tingling are not the condition you’re dealing with; they’re your body alerting you to a problem. The longer you have these signals, the more chronic the condition, and the worse your health and your body’s ability to function. Eventually, your body defaults to this dysfunctional pattern and starts to see it as normal. It learns dysfunction and disease are normal, making correcting it much harder. This is why it’s so critical to listen to the alarm of low back pain and have a chiropractor evaluate the health of your spine.

How We Treat Low Back Pain in Smithtown, NY

Comprehensive Consultation and Exam

Whether you’re suffering from low back pain or just coming in for a wellness visit, we always start by taking a thorough history. We want to know everything you’ve been experiencing. We also want to know your short-term, intermediate, and long-term health goals. Our job is to find the root cause of your problem, but the place where you feel your pain is often not the source. That’s why we want to know all about you.

If we think chiropractic is the solution that you need, we’ll move on to our examination. This deep neuro spinal evaluation will consist of postural analysis, assessing your weight balancing, and three types of neurological scans to see how your nerves are firing. Posture is a crucial indicator of whether you are loading your lower back joints properly and any influence your upper body and neck have on your lower back pain. If we detect nerve interference, balance discrepancy, or misalignments in your pelvis, shoulders, or neck, we’ll take X-rays to get a good look at what’s really going on in your body.

After collecting all the data from your history and exams, we’ll put your clinical findings together with your goals and design a plan to ensure we address your low back pain problem on your next visit.

Specific Chiropractic Care in Smithtown, NY

Subluxation is the primary focus for chiropractors caring for the holistic wellness of their patients. ‘Sub’ meaning under, and ‘lux’ meaning light, a subluxation is a misalignment in the spine inhibiting the flow of energy through the spinal cord. It only takes the weight of a dime to cause subluxation and change the way the nerves transmit information, showing just how delicate the nervous system is.

We take subluxations incredibly seriously, perhaps more than cancer or a terminal illness. This is because a subluxation is a precursor to severe disease. If a nerve isn’t sending the correct information to the systems, organs, cells, and tissues, you will get sick and stop functioning correctly. Finding and fixing even just one subluxation can save your life.

Our thorough spinal analysis detects subluxations and subluxation patterns. Using a specific, scientific adjustment, we can correct subluxations to improve nerve flow and function throughout the body and reducing low back pain.

Custom Corrective Exercise Program

On top of addressing subluxations and aligning the spine, we want the body to be able to hold these correct postures and positions and strengthen its ability to do so. Anytime we give exercises as part of a low back pain care plan, they’re always specific to your unique situation. We provide “Life Extension Exercises” to correct all spinal curves, including the neck, mid back, and lower back.

These exercises start training your body to hold you in a more favorable and aligned posture to relieve pressure on the joints, nerves, muscles, and ligaments. We’re chiropractors, we do everything from the inside out, not the outside in. We want everybody to strengthen from the inside out. Outside-In strategies like over-the-counter medication and surgery are only effective at pain management and not resolving the solution once and for all, especially when talking about low back pain.

Because each vertebra in the spine works with another one, you must also address the neck to fully correct a lower back issue. C1, the vertebrae at the top of the neck, partners with L5, the lowest lumbar spine segment. C2 with L4, and so on. MDs, PTs, and orthopedists often miss this holistic aspect of the spine and provide care that isn’t effective.

Common Causes of Low Back Pain in Smithtown, NY

Bulging Disc

Our spinal discs are like jelly doughnuts. There’s a gelatinous nucleus in the middle surrounded by a fibrous, cartilaginous exterior. They sit between each vertebra and provide space for a nerve to exit the spinal cord and service the body. The disc maintains the height between the bones to protect the nerve. As soon as the nerve gets damaged, another body part is damaged.

Too much pressure put through the disc results in a disc bulge where the disc protrudes and impinges the nerve. One of the most electrifying, awful pains in the entire body can be a disc injury like a bulged or herniated disc.

Herniated Disc

A herniated disc is when the “jelly” actually escapes from the disc. Herniations are more serious than bulging discs as it’s like a lesion on your spinal cord.

You must look at lifestyle whenever you’re looking at disc injuries to assess if your profession or daily habits are causing too much stress on the discs. Disc problems generally get worse when someone’s bent forward in flexion or rotation. You may need to alter your activity to avoid triggers and reduce inflammation. Cold therapy is another way to reduce inflammation – cold is good, and heat is bad.

In the office, we’ll work to open the space around the disc to restore its natural structure. We’ll also look at the vertebral subluxation complex – how the relationship between the discs, joints, ligaments, and muscles relates to alignment and stress.

Diet plays a significant role in disc injuries as well. You cannot get a disc injury unless you’re experiencing chronic stress, linking these injuries to the adrenal glands and the amount of adrenaline and other stress hormones coursing through the body. We may recommend supplementation or nutritional therapy to support and heal the adrenals, in addition to staying properly hydrated and eating a mineral-rich diet while avoiding processed foods and sugar. Sugar unnaturally inflames the body, disrupting normal function and healing.

SI Joint Pain

The sacroiliac joint (SI joint) is where the sacrum meets the ilium in the lower back. Your sacrum is the triangular bone at the back of the pelvis. It’s the bone your whole spine sits on, making it a keystone bone. All of your skeleton sits on your sacrum. The ilium bones on either side of the sacrum form a ring that houses your organs. The SI joint is where the sacrum and ilium bones meet, with many muscles connecting the sacrum to the hips.

An imbalanced pelvis leads to SI joint pain. A rotated pelvis as one ilium goes forward and the other backward leaves the sacrum stuck in the middle, trying to navigate between the two. This stretches the ligaments and disrupts the joint capsule causing inflammation and misalignment. This changes the way the muscles work and interferes with the delicate balance they are trying to strike, leaving one set of muscles weak and the other too strong. Ideally, the muscles and joints work together, but this imbalance creates a messy pattern of irregular muscle firings that can upset the sacroiliac joint.

Facet Joint Dysfunction

Face joints are the little joints connecting each vertebra to each other. Uneven loading of stress causes these joints to dysfunction. An abnormal spine curvature, like scoliosis or a neck, hip, or pelvic problem, puts more pressure on one side of the spine than the other. Facet joints are very vulnerable because they are in a transitional area and travel the whole length of the spine. Each joint carries the load of everything above and below it. An irregular twist or muscle imbalance leads to inflammation, and the nerves adjacent to those joints become aggravated and create pain and dysfunction throughout the body.

The beauty of chiropractic care is that it assesses the body as a whole. We don’t isolate just the lower back or just a shoulder; everything works with everything else.
The way we analyze someone with low back pain or any problem is by checking the whole spine to identify the root cause of the problem. We use a specific, scientific chiropractic adjustment to relieve pressure on the nerves, restore muscle balance, and provide natural, long-term low back pain relief.

Frequently Asked Questions

How should I sleep with low back pain?

If you’re a side sleeper, sleep with the pillow under your neck, maintaining a 90° angle, with another pillow between your knees and ankles. If you sleep on your back, sleep with a pillow underneath your knees.

How does a slipped disc feel?

A slipped disc can feel like many things. Shooting pain down your butt into your leg, a constant ache, loss of sensation in your lower leg or foot, tingling pins and needles, or weakness in your feet. Sometimes, the nerves are so damaged you lose all sensation. You just have numbness, which is actually much worse than feeling. If it’s really bad, you can lose bowel or bladder function and could experience erectile dysfunction.

What is better for low back pain, a chiropractor or massage?

A chiropractor’s goal is to get to the root cause of your lower back pain through a thorough analysis of your nervous system, assessing which nerves are affected and which parts of your spine are damaged. Massage will just rub out the tight muscles, and sometimes those tight muscles are there to protect you. The body is so intelligent and may be protecting you from more harm. You don’t want to take down a fence until you know what it’s guarding.

When should I be worried about low back pain?

Immediately. Low back pain isn’t always just lower back pain. The nerves in the low back supply many of your central organs, including your digestive system, bowels, bladder, reproductive organs, and lower limbs. If you do have lower back pain, you should get it checked immediately.

How do I tell if low back pain is muscle or disc-related?

The best way to get to the root cause of your low back pain is to get checked by your local chiropractor.