"Low back pain is the most common and debilitating of all pain complaints. Heavy lifting can cause it, but so can sitting at a desk all day, especially if you have bad posture and poor back support. Think hunching over a laptop at your dining table. Most times, an acute injury causing lower back pain will get better on its own in a matter of weeks. But it also can become a more lasting problem, especially as you age. Now some new science suggests one reason for this could be that we've been approaching the inflammation that comes with back pain all wrong."
""Most back pain is caused by a run-of-the-mill sprain," says Frederick Wilson, DO, a doctor of osteopathic medicine specializing in back pain at Cleveland Clinic's Solon Family Health Center in Solon, OH, who was not involved with the study. "You might be working in the yard or playing football with the kids and you wrench it." Wilson says such injuries often involve muscle spasms and micro-tears in your ligaments."
"But a recent study in Science Translational Medicine suggests that inflammation in the early days of back pain isn't the problem. It actually may be a critical step for the body to heal itself and resolve the pain. It's when that active healing process doesn't happen, the new study finds, that an acute back injury leads to chronic problems. "It's interesting and completely different from how we've approached it before," Wilson said of the findings."
Early inflammation after an acute low back injury functions as a critical part of the body’s healing and pain-resolution process. Many instances of low back pain originate from sprains, muscle spasms, and micro-tears and often improve within weeks. Immediate use of anti-inflammatory medications can relieve pain and swelling in the short term but can also interfere with the active healing processes. Failure of those healing processes allows acute injuries to become chronic, and the likelihood of lasting problems increases with age and unresolved inflammation.
Read at Fortune Well
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