Had back pain before? Yes? It’s common to fear its recurrence, but don’t let it hijack your life! This holiday season, consider Santa. Think he’s had back pain before throwing all those boxes and bags? New Hampshire Spine and Sport imagines so! Santa cannot quit, and neither can you. Southern New Hampshire chiropractic care can help manage new back pain and chronic back pain and guide our Southern New Hampshire back pain sufferers to be a bit less fearful and a bit more confident getting around this holiday season.
FEAR OF BENDING
Your Southern New Hampshire chiropractor knows this: many low back pain patients fear bending forward. Researchers studied this common clinical finding and found that this fear of bending forward also affects postural sway or balance by disrupting hip balance control, bringing about weight shifting from side to side to keep balance. (1) What is an undesirable effect of being unbalanced? A fall. New Hampshire Spine and Sport finds it very critical to help our back pain patients – especially our older back pain patients – stay balanced and upright!
HELP TO KEEP BALANCE AND DECREASE FEAR
“There is an app for that!” Just what our older Southern New Hampshire chiropractic patients with balance issues want to hear?! As much as “tech” can frustrate a few of its users, especially some older users, it can help! The new smartphone-based Gait&Balance App is available. Researchers have documented that it is able to track age-related differences in balance not typically picked up during clinical exam measurements like postural stability, step time, step length and cycle. (2) These insights can assist healthcare providers like your chiropractor create a more beneficial and individualized treatment plan to decrease fear of movement and improve balance. This is quite hopeful, so much so that chiropractic researchers are exerting more research effort to quantify the benefits of multimodal chiropractic care in its ability to affect gait, balance and/or fall risk and prevention. (3) One positive study with older lumbar spinal stenosis patients (average age 83.5 years) found that their postural sway and entropy in addition to function and symptomatology were better with a course of chiropractic care including Cox® Technic Flexion Distraction Decompression spinal manipulation. (4) New Hampshire Spine and Sport offers this treatment along with nutrition and exercise to help our patients keep moving fearlessly and balanced!
BIOMARKERS FOR BACK PAIN
A new nutrition discovery this month may also help this effort. It comes from researchers analyzing levels of biomarkers – C-reactive protein, vitamin D, neuropeptide Y and others - in low back pain patients tested using blood tests with pain and disability. Vitamin D which appears in many health news reports today also appears to be a potential biomarker for back pain relief and disability. A reliable randomized control study found a link between vitamin D levels and changes in both pain and disability for low back pain patients treated with spinal manipulation. (5) One day, we may do blood tests to manage risks for back pain!
CONTACT New Hampshire Spine and Sport
Listen to this PODCAST with Dr. Joel Dixon on The Back Doctors Podcast with Dr. Michael Johnson as he describes his helping a Vietnam veteran deal with his back pain for 20 years, incorporating the Cox® Technic System of Spinal Pain Management.
Make your Southern New Hampshire chiropractic appointment now. Calling all our Southern New Hampshire back pain patients! Bring us your back pain and your fear of back pain, bending and falling. We can help you handle them as well as Santa fearlessly and efficiently delivers all his presents in one night!