Interpreting Back Pain Symptoms
With a doctors view of your back pain symptoms, what they see may not be what you’ve got
A renowned physician at a New York medical centre treated a guy named James. After reviewing his back pain symptoms and examining James thoroughly, he asked whether his back had been X-rayed recently. It hadn’t. The doctor thought for a few seconds and, reasonably certain that the problem was muscular in nature, said, ‘Let’s skip the X-rays. Even if we find a slight abnormality, we still won’t know if it is the cause of your back pain.’
This doctor’s decision turned out to be sound. And his thinking makes an important point about many different back pain symptoms diagnosis – namely, what your practitioner sees may have nothing to do with your problem.
Take the case of the fast-food franchise manager who had low back pain for the first time at the age of 45. An X-ray showed that two of his lumbar vertebrae were fused and apparently had been so since birth. The practitioner attributed the pain to this congenital fusion. But the vertebrae had been fused for 45 years without causing back pain.
Furthermore, the patient’s pain vanished in a few weeks while the fused vertebrae, of course, did not. So there’s no way of telling whether the malformation had anything to do with the episodes of back pain.
There are probably millions of people with visible conditions – mild scotiosis, lordosis, some osteoarthritis and congenital mal-formations – who don’t have back pain. There are also millions of people with these problems who do have back pain. And millions of people suffer terribly despite the absence of any obvious back pain symptoms on which to blame the pain. So remember that your spinal curve or malformed vertebra may have nothing to with any given bout of back pain.
Here are some more examples of mis-diagnosed back pain symptoms:
A book-keeper with low back pain saw three specialists, two of whom attributed the back pain symptoms to a curvature in her upper back (scoliosis). The third practitioner agreed that there was a curvature but commented, ‘It is ludicrous to think that this mild a curvature could be the major cause of your problem.’ The patient’s treatment and recovery had nothing to do with trying to correct, counter or even consider her spinal curvature.
A farmer was told by one back specialist that his sciatica had been caused by a congenital hip malformation. Another specialist noted the malformation but didn’t think it was congenital or worth worrying about. The farmer recovered by devising his own treatment plan.
A 73-year-old retired hospital administrator was told that an extra lumbar vertebra was causing an unstable back with resultant low back pain. The patient asked her doctor why a structural oddity should suddenly be giving her trouble. There was no answer. There is no answer.
The moral: once you have a diagnosis from your back pain symptoms that rules out serious structural abnormalities, you can probably afford to ignore the little curves and various oddities that practitioners like to point to as maybe, could-be, might-well-be reasons for back pain.
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