Causes of a Sprained Back

Series Summary

Your back pain is begging for a cure. If you haven't visited a chiropractor, now is the time. Chiropractic care is based on the premise that spinal joint dysfunction can result in a variety of diminished health conditions by interfering with the nervous system. It is a health care profession which diagnoses and treats disorders of the spine and musculoskelatal system, and commonly includes spinal adjustments and decompression. While using spinal adjustment for back pain has been around since ancient Egypt, chiropractors now use a variety of methods, including massage, strength training, electrical stimulation and traction in order to treat patients.

In this free health care video series, our expert chiropractor Eric Sayer gives you advice on how to relieve your back pain and how to prevent it from coming back. He discusses the causes of a sprained back and tells you how to avoid causing further injury to your back. You will learn about medicines, both over-the-counter and herbal, that can help with pain relief. The R.I.C.E acronym is a helpful guide to treating your back pain. It stands for Rest, Ice, Compress and Elevate. Dr. Sayer discusses each of these treatments in detail.

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Dr. Eric Sayer from Sayer Family Chiropractic. I'm here on behalf of Expert Village. In this segment, we're going to be talking about a strained back and how it happens. The spine, the lumbar spine, which is the low back right through here, has many muscles, ligaments, and tendons that attach to it. This model of course doesn't have those. As we do certain things, we load the muscles, load the ligaments, we may load them improperly by what we do. Whether it's lifting too much, bending, twisting in the wrong type of direction or manner. What will happen is those ligaments and tendons will strain or sprain. Fancy ways of saying they'll tear. Micro tears that will cause the ligaments and tendons to be painful. They'll spasm up, they won't work properly, and that's more or less how a sprain happens. It can happen anywhere along the spine, but we're going to be talking about the low back."