how can i cure my back muscle pain or just relieve it?
my back muscles hurt a lot. it happened when i was swimming in the ocean and cracked my neck on the ocean floor.
my back has been getting worse and worse each day. its not the bone that hurts its the muscles.
When I’m sitting its just fine. but if i arch my back it hurts to the point where i loose a breath; like a little bit of shock or something. also if i do any twisting it hurts a lot as well.
i try to stretch my back out and it hurts but once i get to the full extension of the stretch the pain goes away… until i return to my original position.
maybe it is the bone that is messed up. I wanna go see a doctor. im going to go in on thursday. Thing is i don’t trust these navy docs and ill never have time to go on my own. Any suggestions would help though. especially if there is something i can do on my own.
When you say “cracked your neck on the ocean floor” do you mean you struck your head on the bottom while diving?
Obviously, evaluation by a medical professional is really the best course of action. I would suggest someone who specializes in musculoskeletal problems like an osteopathic physician or a chiropractor. They can evaluate you and refer you to a specialist if necessary. But any physician is better than none.
Here is a hypothesis you can ask your physician about: you may have herniated disc(s) in your cervical spine. This would not be visible in an x-ray but would be in an MRI. Remember this is only a hypothesis, but I can tell you a bit about this type of injury, and you can see if it seems correlated with your situation.
Basically your spine, from neck to lower back, is made up of a bunch of vertebrae, each separated by a flexible disc; each of these junctures is a joint. When you apply too much force to the system, the discs can tear, bulge, or become compressed.
Your spinal cord runs behind the vertebral bodies, and nerves come out of it periodically to feed your arms, back, and eventually your legs. If a disc is deformed in a manner that causes it to press on either the nerves coming out of the spinal cord (nerve root) or worse, the spinal cord itself, then the muscles fed by those nerves will trigger, causing a muscle spasm. Basically, you won’t be able to command your muscles to unlock, and in bad cases, it can hurt like hell.
The best case scenario is that your injury is relatively mild and the muscle spasm will relax and you will feel better without intervention in a couple of weeks.
The worst case scenario is that your spinal cord actually has a disc pressing on it, this could be very dangerous. This may cause you to lose control of your bowels. It could also cause horrible pain (radiating down your arm(s) in the case of a herniated disc in your cervical spine, or your legs if the injury is in your lumbar spine). These are bad signs that indicate immediate evaluation by a doctor, but you have not mentioned these, and they are hard to miss, so this doesn’t seem to fit your situation.
You are most likely between these two extremes. But even if you aren’t experiencing the worst symptoms described above, you still may have an injury that needs to be taken care of. For these types of injuries to your cervical spine, you would most likely feel spasms (pain) between your shoulder blades, around your scapula.
Muscle spasms coming from most herniations can (and should) be treated manually by an osteopathic physician or a chiropractor; they can use their hands to press on you and move your head around (in the case of the cervical spine) so that they move the vertebrae into positions that don’t press so strongly on the nerves. There is really no way to do this yourself.
Icing the muscle helps numb it, while icing the actual source of the injury (which may not exactly be under the muscle) helps shrink the disc temporarily due to thermal contraction.
Rest helps as well, as these injuries can be degenerative (i.e. they can be worsened by activity over time). And they can take an extremely long time to heal, sometimes months or years.
Here’s hoping you feel better soon.
Edit: Richard, he may experience the spasms in his back, even though the injury is in his neck; it depends on the level of the injury (i.e. which disc is involved). Also, pain from cervical herniated discs may radiate down the arms in more severe cases, but not necessarily in all cases. So just because it is not happening, you can’t rule out a cervical herniation.
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