Bouncing back from back pain

Dealing with Healing

If, despite your best preventive measures, back pain strikes, address it stat so you won’t be sidelined longer than necessary. You might treat it with an anti-inflammatory. According to a recent review of studies in Spine, a heat wrap around the lumbar region can also provide short-term relief. Combining heat therapy with a few easy lower-back exercises (such as hugging your knees to your chest) can reduce pain over the course of a week. If your pain is excruciating, however, exercise might be a stretch, but do try to move as much as possible. “Not doing anything will just make you tighter and stiffer,” says Kinchen. If, after three to four days, you still feel debilitating pain, see a doctor.

When the pain recedes, return to your regular exercise routine. What helps prevent back pain also helps heal—research has shown that Pilates can improve back pain, and preliminary results from a Boston University School of Medicine Study found that after three months of yoga, chronic back pain sufferers reduced their pain by 33 percent (a group that did nothing reduced pain by only 5 percent). Surina Scheepers, who now works as a travel nurse (“Not a lot of lifting or turning”), sometimes still has bouts of pain, a souvenir from her 10-year stint in the ICU. A year ago, she started doing yoga and Pilates. “It seems to have made a big difference,” says Scheepers, 37.

If you’re not up for learning anything new, don’t discount routine ab exercises. Janet Wise, director of education at Brotman Medical Center in Culver City, Calif., has held a number of nursing jobs over the years, including one in an orthopedic clinic that left her with pain that still comes and goes. “If I do 50 to 100 good old abdominal crunches a day, I’m pain-free,” she says. “I’ve also stretched out on many a break room floor.”

Reducing stress is also key. Experts don’t know exactly why stress exacerbates back pain and contributes to reoccurrence, but they do acknowledge that there’s a connection. Joyce Dillon, for one, always seems to have flare-ups in times of stress. “Managing stress is hard for nurses, but it really attacks your back,” says Dillon, 64, who eventually left med-surg nursing to work as a psychiatric nurse, partly because of what it was doing to her body.

Alternative Approaches to Pain

The good news about bad backs? There’s a range of treatment and management options that are a bit off the beaten path, but they’re all the more attractive if you don’t want to resort to NSAIDS or prescription muscle relaxers.

Physical therapy is a common antidote to back pain, and other types of movement training also seem to help. When Wise’s back was at its worst, she turned to the Egoscue method, a series of stretches and movements aimed at aligning all the joints. The theory (egoscue.com) goes that imbalances cause strain on the back. “It improves your posture,” says Wise, “and that helps take away the pain.”

Seth-Deborah Roth found respite from her back troubles with self-hypnosis. As an OR nurse, Roth had been amazed at how much hypnosis helped burn patients cope with pain. Years later, she started using self-hypnosis to deal with her aching back, an approach that seems to work by distracting one’s attention from the pain and/or altering the body’s physiology. “I might visualize blood coming to the area that hurts, increasing the circulation and inviting healing to take place,” says Roth, who now teaches a course on medical hypnosis in Castro Valley, Calif. “Self-hypnosis has no side effects and it doesn’t need to be refrigerated!”

The success rate for these therapies, it should be said, varies. For instance, a 2007 study published in the journal Clinical Evidence found that chiropractic manipulation seemed to reduce pain, though only temporarily, and studies have found that acupuncture can also offer relief—though, again, in the short term.

Surgery: The Last Resort

When all else fails, surgery may be called for. This is often the best option for a herniated disk that’s pressing on a nerve and sending pain like an electric shock down the leg. After years spent lifting, lugging and tugging patients as a floor nurse, Denise Mironti, 49, wound up with a herniated disk. She lived with excruciating pain for a year and a half, finally opting to have a discectomy to remove the disk material pressing on a nerve. The surgery was three years ago and she has been pain-free ever since.

Back pain can be such a mystery that not all surgeries work, and for that reason alone, surgery should be the approach of last resort. Finding what does work for you might take some trial and error—be patient, and allow yourself to be the patient. Most importantly, don’t ignore the pain. “Get it checked out and be persistent about getting the treatment you need,” says Mironti. “You only have one back—treat it well.”