Is severe lower back pain, threatening to ruin your upcoming vacation. This video is perfect for you. Hi, I’m Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. I help active adults overcome their aches and pains to keep them doing their favorite activities without pain medication, injections, or surgery. In this video we’re going to talk about Tom. Tom woke up with severe lower back pain and it could not have come at a more inopportune time because he had been planning for months, an amazing hiking trip in Africa.
With long walks in airports, the long travel hours, and the actual vacation being about hiking, he was freaking out that he was gonna have to cancel the vacation. And worse, he thought he was gonna have to have his third lower back surgery!
In this video we’re gonna talk about how he went from that horrible moment to fully enjoying his vacation without pain!
Tom is in his early sixties and he loves to travel. He takes photos and has taken beautiful pictures all over the country and he plans these large trips with other groups. In this case, the trip was to Africa and this trip had been on the books for months. Because of his history with lower back problems, he’s had two surgeries, one of which was a, a fusion, one of which was a laminectomy.
A fusion helps join two bones together to help it improve its stability.
And a laminectomy helps open up the joint space. Your nerve goes through a hole and sometimes that whole shrinks. So they go in and open that hole again. They basically just drill out some bone. That’s what a laminectomy does.
Back health is his number one priority, and because of that, he has changed a lot about his lifestyle. He has a trainer that he works with on a regular basis and his wife and he go on walks at least three times a week, they walk two miles in the morning and two miles in the evening…which is amazing.
All good things for his back, so when he called me, he said he woke up with severe lower back pain. His wife had to help him get out of bed, once he was up, he was like, okay, maybe this is not as bad as I thought. He walked around for a little bit and it was all right.
Over the course of that day, what he discovered was that he couldn’t sit in his office chair for longer than 30 minutes the aching became too severe and it was almost worse as he was trying to get up, but at least it would subside for a while once he was standing up. After two or three minutes, he was okay walking It would start off uncomfortable, but it would be good for a little bit and then it would just be excruciating. And so he wasn’t able to complete the walks with his wife.
Not being able to complete the walks with his wife devastating because it, it was part of his workout routine it was also their time to talk, it’s their time to socialize with their neighbors. So this back pain was just wrecking a lot of things for him.
He couldn’t work, he couldn’t hang out with his wife and do the things that they usually do, and now the pain may take away his vacation. He went ahead and called the surgeon because he was certain he was gonna need MRI and possibly an injection. He called me relatively early I was getting there before he had seen his surgeon again.
So we’re poking around and trying to figure out where the pain is coming from. I check out how his spine is moving. We look at how well his hips are moving, check out some strength. I watch him walk, look at his overall posture and what we’ve figured out was it was that the severe pain going across his lower back but luckily it did not go down his leg. If pain goes down your leg, it means a nerve is being pinched so just having the pain in his lower back and being able to press on it and it was very teder. That told me that we were dealing with two isolated points of irritation. Now the question is why are they irritated? Here comes a bit of an anatomy lesson.
In your hips and lower back you have your sacrum & your coccyx, it attaches to your hip bones. And these two joints on Tom were severely inflamed. Then you have your lumbar spinefor Tom, these two joints just don’t move so the joints below and above are supposed to move even a little bit more. But on him, nothing was moving. This whole thing was completely locked out, and these two joints here were the hips attached to your sacrum were moving way too much. I think we figured out the cause of your discomfort these two points are severely inflamed so we talked about icing, we talked about how to stabilize those joints, while he’s doing his everyday activities to allow the joint to relax and heal and let some of the fluid leave.
When we finished up the eval, I gave him a couple things that he could do and I had already done some manual stuff to see if that would calm it down. The next time I saw him, he was amazed. He said, “I was a little sore that night, but when I woke up the next morning,
He said, “I’m not canceling the surgeon yet because I wanna see how this goes over the next couple weeks. But, I’m very hopeful now.” A huge weight was lifted because he was able to sit longer at work. He was able to go about halfway on a walk with his wife. He saw an amazing transformation and it decreased the amount of worry and anxiety he had dramatically. So we continued to work on a few things, isolating muscle groups to make sure things were working correctly. I talked to him about how to modify what he was working on with his trainer, so he didn’t have to stop doing other things that he was doing with his trainer. Over the next couple weeks all of his pain subsided and that couldn’t have come at a better time because by the time all the pain subsided he was getting ready to to pack and do some other things for his trip.
Next we talked about what to do if he has a flare up on vacation. I gave him an action plan for that and things that he can do to stabilize and stretch if he has any pain. I was very thankful that when he came back he told me that he had no pain. He’d never had any inkling of problem and he fully enjoyed that amazing vacation.
I got to see the most beautiful pictures from Africa, some amazing animals that you don’t get to see anywhere else. Tom was over the moon and so he is fully back to walking his four miles a day with his wife and he is enjoying life. His trainer was also very thankful because he’s back working with him full-time. All’s well that ends!
but you have some questions about your specific situation, it’s different for everybody and it can be very overwhelming and reading stuff the internet and all the different advice you get from friends, sometimes it’s a little too much to process and deal with. So if you have questions that you would like to ask before committing to an appointment, then you’re gonna click the button below that says, talk to a pt. You’ll fill out a quick form, what time would be good for us to call you back. If you need immediate relief I have put together some of my best tips on how to treat back pain, in an ebook so if you click the button below that says, get my tips and fill out a quick form, then just check your inbox and that book will be waiting for you. So until we have an opportunity to meet, I hope that you’re having a great day and I’ll talk to you soon.
If you’re not quite ready to book an appointment yet, you might have some questions you would like answered first. Click below to request to speak with a PT first.
If you’re looking for more information on how to overcome back pain, I’ve put my best tips in this Free Ebook
“7 Tips To Keep Your Back From Going Out More Than You!”
click the link below, fill out a quick form then check your inbox.’
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