Why getting lower back pain relief wont get you what you actually want!

First we need to understand what back pain is and its purpose.

Lower back pain is a warning signal from the brain to alert you there is a cause for concern in the area. This warning signal is designed to cause you enough discomfort to change, to stop your current lifestyle and seek help. 

Simply put, back pain's purpose is to provoke change.

Unfortunately we have designed methods, products and ideologies to literally block this signal  as we foolishly think pain is the problem. 

Lower back pain is not the problem, it is the warning siren for a problem.

Think of  back pain like the red flashing triangle on your dashboard. When the flashing warning light turns on, your goal shouldnt be “Lets take my car to the garage to get this light turned off”. 

Insead it should be “Lets take my car to the garage to fix whatever is causing my warning light to flash. 

Much like a car as well, the flashing warning light on your dashboard doesn’t indicator the exact location of the problem. Its purpose is to get your attention as effectively as possible.

This is much like our bodies.

Back pain is a very effective method of getting our attention. From struggling to stand up getting out of bed, to putting on our socks, to any bending, lifting or turning during the day. 

Anyone who has suffered from back pain will understand how difficult it is to function with it. 

This makes back pain a very efficient warning signal. 

But taking pain killers day in day out, or massaging and stretching the pain away  to provide  a couple hours of back pain relief, won’t help you.

These methods are very superficially addressing the back pain, not the cause of the problem. 

From my experience helping 100’s of clients every week over the last few years, what people really want is to have a great quality of life and the freedom to do what they want, when they want it, without limitations. 

To achieve this you have to look at the long term, as the goal is long term.

If you only address the lower back pain, on a day by day timescale, you are reducing the likelihood of achieving your goal. 

As every day, week and month that goes by masking or hiding the back pain, the true cause of the problem is worsening. It’s embedded into your nervous system, it’s causing compensations, overloading other tissues and creating more dysfunction in your system. 

 

Like Japanese knotweed, an unaddressed true cause can quickly grow and spread. Disrupting the foundations and integrity of your system. Then not only does the original true cause need to be resolved, the knotweed, but all the structural damage also, compensations in the body's case.