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Back Pain

Back Pain

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Did you know that an estimated 75 to 85 percent of all Australian will experience some form of back pain during their lifetime? Most certainly low back pain can be quite debilitating and painful. Good news, most cases respond well with non-surgical treatment. However, it has been estimated that 50 percent of all patients who suffer from an episode of low back pain will have a recurrent episode within one years.

The costs associated with diagnostic procedures alone are estimated at $50 billion yearly. Back pain is one of the most common reasons for missed work. In fact, back pain is the second most common reason for visits to the doctor’s office, outnumbered only by upper-respiratory infections. The personal costs are immeasurable from chronic pain alone, pain sometimes so great that it interferes with a healthy and satisfying lifestyle.

Also, it is recognized that most cases of back pain are mechanical in nature, and the pain is usually not caused by very serious conditions, such as cancer, fracture, infection, etc. The anatomy of the spine and the many conditions that negatively impact spinal health are complex. The following information provides a simplistic explanation of the causes for back pain:

Some common causes of Low Back Pain

On many occasions you first feel back pain just after you lift a heavy object, move suddenly, sit in one position for a long time, sustain an injury or have been in an accident. Prior to that moment in time, there was often a pre-existing weakness, or loss of tissue integrity in your spinal structures.

The specific structures in your back responsible for your pain are difficult to determine in many cases.

Whether identified or not, there are several possible sources of low back pain:

Less Common Causes of Low Back Pain

You are at particular risk for low back pain if you:

Are non-surgical treatments a better option than surgery?

In most cases, non-surgical therapy done at Scoliosis & Spine Correction Clinic is better than surgery. This is due to the fact that surgery physically alters the spine by removing all or part of the problematic disc. Although this can reduce the pressure on the nerve, and relieve the back pain, the surgery tends to place more stress on the healthy discs above and below

As with any operation, there are risks involved with spine surgery and complications can be severe. Possible complications include injury to your spinal cord, nerves, esophagus, carotid artery or vocal cords; non-healing of the bony fusion; failure to improve; instrumentation breakage and/or failure; infection; bone graft site pain.

Other complications may include phlebitis in your legs, blood clots in the lungs or urinary problems.

Surgery to relieve chronic lower back pain is usually no better than intensive rehabilitation and nearly twice as expensive.

We do not ignore the fact that there is a small percentage of cases that indeed require surgery or medication. Indeed, in certain cases, surgery can significantly help back pain sufferers. But surgery should always be a last resort, offered when conservative treatments have failed.

We recommend that you exhaust all other avenues before surgery, try Dr. Kevin Lau’s non-surgical innovative treatment!