Back pain affects tons of people around the world every year. It is an incredibly problematic condition that leads to many hospital visits, and many clinicians have no idea how to help these poor patients who suffer from back pain.

Worse yet, some cases of lower back pain differ in chronicity. Specifically, some stick around for months or years, while others resolve within a few days. In this article, we’ll take a look at the different types of low back pain and provide an overview of how chiropractic care can help with this tricky condition.

Acute vs. Chronic Conditions

To start, it may be helpful to define some common medical terms: acute and chronic.

Generally, acute refers to things that last a very short time. This timeline can vary slightly. However, most clinicians use the term “acute” when describing conditions that last less than two weeks. 

Chronic conditions, on the other hand, are those that last longer than 2 weeks. 

Of course, just to make things complicated, there are also distinctions such as subacute and intermittent that can confuse the issue. But for our purposes, let’s just assume that the two-week cut-off, described above, is our dividing line between acute and chronic.

Acute Low Back Pain

Many acute conditions affect the low back. For instance, any and all of the following can lead to transient, temporary low back pain.

  • Lifting something heavy.
  • Straining a muscle due to a sudden movement.
  • Rolling over during sleep, or sleeping in a bad position.
  • Trauma, such as a car crash.

Acute low back pain can be mild or severe. You may be unable to stand up straight when you suffer a bout of acute low back pain, but you’ll eventually overcome the problem once the damaged tissue heals from whatever caused the pain in the first place.

Chronic Low Back Pain

Chronic low back pain is an entirely different animal from acute lower back pain.

All of the same conditions and situations highlighted in the previous section can lead to chronic low back pain. Additionally, any of the following issues can also cause chronic lumbago.

  • Fibromyalgia.
  • Surgical complications.
  • Wear and tear, or osteoarthritis.

Chronic low back pain is interesting because there are often no clinical findings when one is examined for the condition. For instance, if the individual were to be x-rayed or to receive an MRI, there would often be few, if any significant findings. 

For this reason, many clinicians used to consider chronic low back pain to be “made up” by patients who were seeking worker’s compensation claims or other benefits. This was unfortunate, and the stigma caused by these lazy clinicians continues to echo today.

Luckily, many providers now realize that chronic low back pain is a very real phenomenon, and that these patients are suffering mightily.

Low Back Pain Treatments

Whether back pain is acute or chronic is largely irrelevant. What matters most is that the patient is diagnosed properly, and that the clinician identifies what is causing the back pain in the first place.

For instance, some patients may have extreme weakness in certain areas of the back. By strengthening these muscles, they can often enjoy significantly decreased symptoms. 

Other patients may have spinal subluxations, which respond very well to chiropractic care.

By performing a specific adjustment to the spinal segment in question, chiropractors can often reduce pain and dysfunction in the spine significantly. 

Are you suffering from acute or chronic low back pain? If so, it’s time to come see your local Lithia, FL chiropractor at At Last Chiropractic. We can help you today! Book your appointment now.