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The first thing to consider is, "What is the origin of the sharp or sudden pain of a back injury?" To some, it feels like a sharp, stabbing pain; to others, a seizing grip that interferes with breathing. Perhaps it is just that: the seizing grip of muscles going into spasm, causing stabbing back pain.

Back Pain Treatment and Physical Therapy

Medical practitioners, including physical therapists, face a peculiar quandary with regard to back pain and muscle spasms in general: so often, the pain they encounter in their patients comes from muscular spasticity, so much of their effort goes into ending muscular spasms, and yet so many of their patients return with the same muscle spasms and back pain for which they have been treated in the past. According to one physical therapist, the likelihood of a patient who has had back pain returning again with the same problem is about 80%.

Let's take another look at back pain, in particular.

Unless you have had a violent accident, your back pain, whether sudden or chronic, has been coming for a very long time. Muscular tension builds up for a long time before crossing the point of no return and becoming a back spasm. Then, like the straw that broke the camel's back, a small movement is sufficient to trigger a crisis.

We return to the quandary of back spasms. What causes the build-up of tension? What controls muscular tension?

The answer may be obvious to you: your brain controls your muscular tension; your brain causes your muscles to go into spasm.

Here, the answer may not seem so obvious -- but obvious it is: conditioning. Your brain is an organ of conditioning, of learning. People acquire their tensions through conditioning: repeated overuse, repeated overstrain, repeated stress. Repetition leads to habit formation and habit formation leads to involuntary habits of tension. Back pain is a nervous tension habit conditioned into you through the repetitive strains of life. At that point, your nervous tension is no longer a reflection of a momentary emotional state, but set in the habituation operation of your brain and muscular system.

So the problem is simpler than you might expect. You probably do not have a medical problem; you probably have a conditioning problem. With tingling or numbness, the muscles of your back are so tight that they are pulling your vertebrae (the small bones of your spine) so close that they are pinching nerves. By relaxing those muscles, you can take the pinch off the nerves.

Fortunately for those using the right methods, a muscular conditioning problem can often be cleared up fairly quickly -- past experience notwithstanding.

The problem with most methods used to relax muscles -- mental methods, manipulative methods, therapeutic methods in general --is that they may not adequately teach muscular control. Muscular control has two parts: the ability to create muscular tension and the ability to relax muscular tension. Both abilities are needed; otherwise, you are either musclebound (and prone to cramping) or weak. Such methods also often neglect an important part of control: sensory awareness. Too often, people are given therapeutic exercises but no instructions in how to do them; they're told, "These are strengthening exercises," so people go for strength instead of control; they go for effort instead of sensory awareness. If you can't feel how to regulate your muscular tension, you can't feel how to relax your muscular tension. You feel pain with no connection to the sense of contracting those muscles to the point of fatigue. Progress comes slowly, at best, from working too fast and too mechanically.

Submit by Lauren.

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