The Haphazard Blog

It seems like back pain is going around in my family. My mother’s back started to hurt in July and it was a couple months before it felt normal. Then my father’s back started to hurt right before he left for India, but it seemed to feel better after a couple of week. Next up, it was my turn.

A couple weeks ago, I woke up with pain in the lower left part of my back. I’ve woken up with back pain before in the past, usually from a hotel bed. It will go away after I’ve been up for a few hours. No such luck this time. When my parents went to the doctor, they got the generic diagnosis. For my mother, she was also sent to get an MRI and physical therapy. Her MRI looked normal and PT didn’t seem to be doing much. My father was just given a muscle relaxant. They were both also told to employ RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation) and take Ibuprofen.

So I went with the generic treatment, RICE and anti-inflammatories. It didn’t help much at all. I am currently in physical therapy, so it was pretty easy to ask my PT about it and have her take a look. Even better for me, she has a lot of experience with back pain. So she started to dig around and found my lower back muscles were out of whack, “knots” and “strings” aplenty. She worked quite a few out using myofascial release. My back hurt in a different way (from what she did) for a couple days. It feels significantly better, but I think I need to have some more work done.

My PT also showed me something else that was interesting. It’s called a Nada Chair. It’s an interesting device. Put simply, it is a postural support for when you are sitting without any support in the back. It uses simple leverage to rotate your pelvis to make you sit straight. It forces you out of a slouched position and also prevents you from falling back into one. Its simplicity in doing this is amazing. It’s not particularly useful to me since my chair has a back that is positioned and shaped to keep me sitting tall, but to any other people who may stumble on this page, it may be something helpful.