Why I have a bad back

Check this link out. It explains in a few sentences what's going on. http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=10387 

So this is the mystery question I've been trying to answer for years and years: why do I have back pain? How did it get crooked? Basically what's going on is I have a compressed disc in my neck and in the very bottom of my lower back. I also have sacroiliac joint instability (the joint that joins your tailbone to your hip bone). In other words, my lower back pops around and out of joint somewhat easily (or at least until I started phys therapy 2 weeks ago). As a result of that instability, sometimes I have sciatica (nerve pain radiating from your lower back down into your toes) in my right leg.

I think it started with my uneven leg length... my right is a quarter inch shorter than my left. For that reason, every day I have a .25" thick piece of cork in my right shoe... which is why I don't often wear sandals. The uneven leg length starts destabilizing the hips when there's uneven amounts of force being applied on each side. It's like somebody took a Jenga block out of my right leg. 

So I corrected the leg length issue... now what?

I have, in my thoracic region (upper/mid back), a bend in my spine where, if you start at the bottom, it curves to the left, and comes back to the right as you near the top. As a result, my left shoulder is often higher than my right, resulting in my top left rib being elevated, which pinches nerves and makes for a tight left upper back. ALSO, that same region that's bent is also ROTATED, so it looks like scoliosis at first glance. So whenever I look down, I can see my left ribs sticking out more forward than my right ones, and it freaks me out. My PT says it looks like the pattern of damage you see happen after a fall or a high velocity injury of some sort. One word: skateboarding. Glad I stopped when I did.


Now there's two types of "scoliosis"... real scoliosis and what they call 'functional' scoliosis. Functional scoliosis seems to be what I have, because it's actually responding to treatment, which I'll get to in a sec. Functional scoliosis is where it looks like scoliosis but it's just where you had an old injury misaligning your vertabrae and your muscles started pulling on it until you got a distorted spine that instead of straight up, looks more like a bendy straw. 


How do you find out if it's real scoliosis or not? In my case, by treatment. I just started going to a physical therapist and he's really nice, he's paid a lot of attention to me and my back. He's been able to actually get my joints and back to move a little more back into alignment than they were, which is incredible. He's given me a lot of core exercises and a specialized plan with how many to do of each one, so that I'm not floundering in the dark like I was with my chiropractor. I love my chiropractor but they let me go three years without telling me that I could do core exercises that would let my adjustments actually have an effect lasting longer than two days. In other words... that's a lot of money that could have been better spent. 


So what I'm doing now is this. I have misalignments in my spine. Those are influenced by "muscular imbalances", where you have one side much stronger than the other. If one side of your hips has great stability and is really strong, but the other is weak, you're going to have a lot of inexplicable lower back pain. So the key is to strengthen the weak side. That's exactly what I've been doing the past two weeks and I can tell you I have had ZERO lower back pain during that time... which is extraordinary for me. 


The upper back has its own imbalance as well. For those of you who know about rhomboids, I've been strengthening those so that my shoulders come backwards and away from my chest. That's stabilizing my back and taking the pressure off the compressed disc in my neck. Any time you have shoulders and head that sag forward, you aggravate your neck discs and muscles, creating knots in the muscles called "trigger points". So I've been correcting the underlying cause of those knots, thereby allowing them to release and relax.

The main order of business is now to see if we can get this rotation in the upper/mid back reversed. My PT used a "muscle energy technique" that fatigued one side of my back and strengthened the other by having me rotate and apply force in a certain direction... thereby pulling my spine back to the right. That actually, according to him, straightened it to a degree. This is HUGE. This is the fastest bit of progress I've ever had in such a short period of time. If this continues, I might, (not guaranteed), but might someday have a straight spine and a strong core holding it all in place so it doesn't go out of alignment again. So we know it's functional scoliosis and not real scoliosis because it actually seems to be responding to muscular training. At least, from everything I can tell. 


I'll let you know how my therapy goes. I just want to find a solution so I can start using my money toward savings and not medical costs. So I can one day support a family without having to dedicate so much energy and time and money to just managing the very structure of my back. It's just been absurd. But I have learned patience through this and I'm thankful for it inciting me to rely on my God.

Verdict? I think we're making progress.

The Downsides of Time Travel

 

Reasons NOT to travel through time: 

• Colonial people will think you're weird and kill you

• Natives will worship you as a god, which is awkward

• Your clothing will be terribly out of style

• Your new iPhone will be useless

• ... and, suddenly your breath will be thousands of years old.

Hey guys I'm back

Hi! Since God has been so good in 2011, I'm more interested in bonding with my brothers and moving onward instead of looking back. I'm grateful for my peers, who show their appreciation and love despite not knowing how to help me. I just want to put a quick post up to give the notice I'll be posting soon about things I've learned and things that are happening now, things that will build us up. This blog is hopefully going to reflect something different. I still have some things holding me back, but I won't be giving that the spotlight.