Get Rid Of Mid-Back Pain

Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. I wanted to share a story about a young woman or rather young mom that has a five month old baby. She was holding her baby in one of those baby carriers, which are amazing inventions, but in this case it ended up causing a whole lot of back pain. The pain started from just below her left shoulder blade then extended up to her neck then down to her lower back all on the left side.  It was making breathing difficult. It was making moving difficult. Not to mention, having to carry your baby, having to take care of her other kids, having to do all her housework.This poor mom was just very, very distraught to say the least. She was feeling the pressures of not being able to take care of her newborn. She was feeling the pressure that her other kids needed her attention also. She just wasn't able to move around like she wanted to, not to mention, laundry doesn't wait for anybody. 

All these things were just piling up on her and it just, it was just a lot for her. After listening to her and letting her go over some of these things and tell me about her pain. Where it was coming from and what it was doing and all the things that was stopping her from doing.  I was able to encourage her that I might not be able to fix all of the things that she just told me about, but I can certainly get rid of that back pain.

We can just eliminate that off the list of things that aren't going well for you today. I knew that she didn't really believe me because why would anybody believe that if you're in that much pain,  how can somebody just get rid of that? And certainly not in one day or make it so much better. I told her once we get rid of this pain for you, I'm going to show you how to alter how you're holding your baby so it's not putting so much pressure on your back. Finally we're going to give you a little bit of homework so that you can keep what we’ll do today and keep it gone.  Then we'll decide what we need to do  at the end of the session, in terms of continuing therapy. 

She was like, “Okay, well, let's see if you can stop this from hurting.” She lays down. I spend a good amount of time trying to relax all of her muscles and going over some,, some gentle, hands-on techniques and having her move through some active range of motion to help strengthen things and stretch some things out that needed to be stretched. When she got off the table, she was almost crying again.  I was like, are you in pain? What's going on? Are you okay? And she says, “No, I just didn't really believe that anything that was that severe could just go away that quickly.” She was very happy. She's still moving hesitantly. Cause you know, you don't want to mess it up.  You still believe that the pain is still there. 

I was able to explain what actually happened and what caused the pain in the first place.  And then I was able to explain why it was able to get it to go away so easily. Because obviously that's not something that can be done. I really wish I could take away people's pain that fast all the time. But in this case, I was  confident that it was gonna be a hundred percent resolvable and very quickly, considering the pain had just started the day before. It’s so much easier to get rid of pain, even if it's really, really severe, the day after. Then it is to get rid of pain if it's been festering for several months or years, but anyway, I digress.

We ended by talking about the important part of how to prevent the pain from returning, ie how to improve her ergonomics.  We discussed how she was holding her baby and what posture she was holding, how tight things were and where things were set up with the carrier.

We were able to adjust a few of those things. Hopefully this doesn't become a reoccurring event. Since she is a new mom (with other kids and very limited time) I gave her some simple things to do at home. We talked about how much time she had to devote to exercises. And we found the most important things that she felt she could actually do on her own. And she felt confident that she could do them well and correctly, and that she would be able to keep up with them. At this point, because this was just a couple of days ago, we're waiting for a follow-up to see what she needs.  I just wanted to express that sometimes it's easy for use to just to let things fester for long periods of time, but really it can make a world of difference, especially if you feel like everything's colliding in on you just to go talk with somebody and see if they can help you, because we all need help sometimes.

Especially with moms. You can't take everything on, all at once, and expect that you won’t need help. We're not super women, right? I mean like we don't actually have the “S” on our chest. We are amazing parents! We are amazing moms! But sometimes we need help too. So I hope that this information helps you and I hope you're having a great day. Bye.

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