The Chiropractor’s Back Pain Diary, Part 1
What Do Chiropractors Do When They Get Back Pain?
OK, here goes.
Recently I suffered the embarrassment of being the back fixer guy who got back pain. Cue endless jokes, plus a barrage of questions, mostly… “What do you do when you get back pain?” So I thought I would get it all down in writing, to walk those who might be interested through my reaction, my thought processes, what I do to help myself, and ultimately how it pans out.
This ended up being a monster article, with lots of asides, subjects that deserved a bit of light rabbit-holing, several SHOCKING CONFESSIONS and probably an excess of self-indulgence on my part. So much so that I’ve split it into several parts:
Part 1: What Happened?
Anyway now you’ve got some idea of what you’re letting yourself in for, let’s begin…
Part 1: What Happened?
It was a Tuesday morning clinic like any other, I’d been up early as usual, dropped the kids off at nursery, opened the clinic and even seen a few patients when my back felt a little tight getting out of my chair.
Hmm. That’s weird. Maybe I’ll do some stretches between patients and ease that off.
30 minutes later and I had my next patient, who’s had crippling back pain for three years, expressing her sympathy for me, because I was in such obvious discomfort.
Uh oh.
This wasn’t the first time that I’d suffered a back spasm, but it had never affected my work before, and I’d certainly never had to let on to patients that I was struggling to do the job. I struggled through the last few patients of the morning, with one very kindly agreeing to postpone as her needs weren’t urgent, before rushing home to lie down.
Every movement hurt. Bending forwards. Bending backwards. Reaching for anything. Sitting was excruciating. It felt like someone had put my sacrum in a vice and then ratcheted up the tension on all the muscles of my lower back and hips. My wife made me lunch but wouldn’t be able to nurse me through this as she would be away on business that night and I had two young kids to look after the following day…What the hell was I supposed to do?!
In fact all I could think about was the next challenge. I’d barely even had time to stop and think about why it might have happened - I was too busy worrying about how I would get up from the sofa. Worrying about keeping two kids safe, clean and fed the following day. Every slight deviation from where my back felt safe just prompted another lightning bolt to the base of my spine.
What was your thought process?
“How bad is it?”
Although chiropractors can’t treat themselves, my “insider knowledge” helps me to know how much I should be worried. I didn’t have any “red flags”: no trauma, no pain running into my legs, no numbness or weakness and so on… So I could be almost certain it’s just an episode of what we in the business sometimes call “non-specific lower back pain”. Sounds vague, but with pain like this, research tells us it’s borderline impossible to be more specific than that. Like a stubbed toe or papercut, it can be very painful but fundamentally not serious or structurally harmful.
I did know from recent experience however, that it could take anything from a few days to 6 weeks before I was feeling totally confident in moving though. Ugh. Plenty of time for me to ponder the cause…
“What is it?”
At this point I was 99% sure that my pain was mechanical, and not nerve-related or sinister, despite its intense nature. (Later I would find that when I ran, my foot would go numb after a while and settle down when I stopped. So there may be a very mild nerve irritation involved). But now that I had found a somewhat comfortable position on my back on the sofa, and some suitably distracting content on my phone, my mind started to whir about what might have caused this flare-up. This was nothing new; I’d had several similar episodes going back to 2022.
Back To The Beginning
My first episode of what I would describe as “proper back pain” had been 18 months previously. I was playing rugby and had suffered a family bereavement that week. I’d decided that playing would be a good way to distract myself and while not as fit as I had been in my younger years, I was still training and playing every week. All was well until just after half time when my back tightened up - like it had locked (a feeling I would come to know well). I tried to run it off but a few minutes later I had to concede that a back spasm every time I bent my body to make a tackle was not good for me, and missing tackles would not be good for my team-mates!
That episode took around 6 weeks to slowly calm down, during which I suffered all the classic signs of “Dad Back”:
Grunting while standing up
Getting to the floor very slowly and gingerly to play with my daughter
Lots of holding my breath and bracing for simple movements
Intermittent spasms with sudden or reactive movements
Happily, I did return to playing rugby that season. But in the months and years since that first episode, I’d had a couple of further warning shots from my back; small moments of that vice-like feeling or mornings where it was difficult getting out of bed again, before my back had seized up completely again squatting in my living room. That episode was a year ago now, and I’d only gone and bloody done it again. Why now?
The Penny Drops
Of course.
Big dumb smile on my face. No awareness of the storm brewing in my spine!
I’d played rugby three days previously. Only my third game in around 15 months. Was lucky enough to score a try and stupid enough to attempt a celebratory dive as I did so. I’d felt a little click and soreness at the time but it didn’t persist. In fact I’d felt great the rest of Saturday, but not had much rest since. The combination of a night out and some sleepless children had put paid to any hope of R&R since the match.
So my best guess was that I’d over-exerted one or more of the joints in my lower back, then poured fuel on the fire by not giving it sufficient chance to recover. 5 years ago my back wouldn’t have blinked twice at what I put it through, but the increased demands of family and business and the vastly lower amounts of exercise that I get through these days mean that my body is ill-prepared for such exertions.
This is an important thing to take into consideration when thinking about the causes of our pain. It’s often not one thing that’s caused an overload. An overload can be simply more of whatever you’re doing than your body is used to, or it can be that your body is less prepared for what it can normally do easily - whether that’s through lack of sleep, stress, alcohol intake, medications, malnutrition… The list goes on.
The Causes Behind the Cause
OK, so the reason I got hurt is that I asked my body to do more than it can tolerate, then gave it insufficient rest (probably). Big whoop. That’s every injury. Why can’t my body tolerate a half of rugby and a swan dive any more?
Am I Just Getting Old?
When I thought back, the last time I was lifting what I would call heavy weight was 2020, for obvious reasons. Sure, I’m older now, but I was 37 when I had my first episode and 34 going into the “Year of Coronavirus”. I didn’t feel that “Getting 3 Years Older” was a credible reason for such a huge decrease in what my back will tolerate.
Lifestyle
As hinted at above, my exercise levels took a hit during the pandemic. And they’ve never fully recovered. Going into 2020, I would be doing intense exercise 5 or 6 times a week - a combination of Rugby and CrossFit. And don’t get me started on how bulletproof I felt for those three years in my twenties where I did weekly Pilates classes. Had I become unfit? Compared to what I was, certainly. Compared to what’s normal… Probably. I’m still carrying a bit of extra weight from my rugby days too which could be better used on someone else.
Thinking about it, I realised that I had also lost a lot of what I call “silent exercise” - walking to work and back a few times a day, popping to town whenever I needed something. Those minutes all add up to hours a week of exercise that had been wiped off and not easily replaced (due to the practicalities of nursery drop-off and pickup, running business errands etc.)
So here I had the bones of a strategy for rebuilding my oversensitive, intolerant, neglected lower back. Get lots of exercise, work on your trunk strength, and get enough sleep. Easy(!)
But first I had to get through the next 24 hours. My wife was away and the kids weren’t going to put themselves to bed.
Click here to read The Chiropractor’s Back Pain Diary Part 2: What Did You Do?