If you experience chronic back pain then it is understandable you will be doing everything you can to minimize that pain.
It’s hard for people to understand what it’s like to live with chronic back pain until they have experienced it.
If you believe your pain is chronic and is not likely to ever go away, then you may be looking for ways to help deal with that pain without having to rely on medication.
Whether you just prefer to use natural remedies where possible, or whether there are some side effects from long-term use of the medication you have been prescribed – there are many reasons to consider as many alternative avenues for pain relief as you can to minimize your need for long-term medication consumption.
In this article, we’ll outline a range of different things you can try to minimize the back pain you experience.
If you have ongoing chronic back pain then these things may not be long-term solutions, but they may provide short-term relief at times to help you when things get particularly painful.
Stay Active
The number one piece of advice we can offer is that, where possible, stay as active as you are able to.
When you experience chronic back pain, there is often a delicate balance to ride between doing too much to the point that your acute pain gets a lot worse and not doing enough to the point that your underlying condition could worsen.
Only you can find the right balance, but the key is finding that balance and ensuring you are being as active as you can without aggravating your back injury.
With the pain that comes, it is sometimes tempting to do nothing to try and prevent the acute pain you experience, but this can have negative long-term impacts and leave you worse off overall.
Chiropractic Care
If you’re looking to decrease back pain without medication, then chiropractic care is worth considering.
Chiropractors are experts at understanding the spine and related body areas, and they can help diagnose the potential cause of the pain and put together a treatment plan to reduce it as much as possible.
Regular spinal adjustments can be a very effective form of pain relief, and for some people, it’s the only thing that makes a difference.
Swimming
Swimming is often recommended to people who experience back pain because when you are submerged in the water, it takes the pressure off of your spine in terms of the amount of weight pushing down through your back, and allows you to move your limbs in a way that is typically uncomfortable for you.
Whether you just walk up and down a pool to get the relief or you join a specific rehabilitation class that has a more targeted goal, regular water exposure and water-based activity can be a great way to keep your body active and nimble in a way that is impossible for you to achieve outside of the water.
Epsom Salts Bath
Taking a warm bath multiple times a week with Epsom Salts added to the bath can be an effective pain relief remedy.
Epsom salts are popular for their qualities that reduce swelling and inflammation, relax muscles, and balance out electrolytes.
Ice Pack
Using ice to apply to your problem areas after you have been active is a great treatment to help decrease inflammation, especially for acute, and other short-term forms of pain you might experience.
Heat Pack
Following ice, it may also be beneficial to apply heat to the affected areas. Once the information has died down from the application of the cold pack, applying heat can then help muscles relax and stimulate blood flow, which can encourage nutrients to come into the affected area and heal to the maximum extent that they can.
Depending on the nature of your injury, a combination of ice and heat interchangeably could be the most effective technique.
Stretch
When you experience chronic back pain, it’s tempting to minimize the use of related muscles to try and minimize the potential impact on the problematic areas.
Though this is understandable, when you neglect those other muscles and areas around the pain you can create further issues.
It can be beneficial to develop a stretching routine to maximize the flexibility of all the muscles surrounding your problematic area.
If the muscles around your problematic area of functioning are loose as possible then they are less likely to create tension themselves and further aggravate the pain.
Final Thoughts
When you experience ongoing chronic back pain, medication may seem like the easy option, and in many ways it is.
But if you are looking for ways to reduce your back pain whilst minimizing the extent to which you rely on medication, then the ideas provided in this article give you some things to try.
Make sure anything you try is done in conjunction with advice from a qualified professional to ensure you don’t do anything to make your existing problem even worse.
