When to Worry About Neck and Back Pain… and When Not To

As many as 4 out of 5 adults will experience some form of back pain in their life, and up to 3 out of 5 will experience neck pain. Chances are that you’ve dealt with some form of back or neck pain in your life as well, or maybe you’re even currently coping with these aches and pains.

It can be hard to differentiate when this form of pain is warranted (i.e. Muscle pains associated with exercise), or if the discomfort can be attributed to a problem that needs to be corrected.

When Not to Worry About Neck Pain

If you’re working a desk job and spending countless hours hunched over your computer, peering into the blue light abyss, your posture is certainly suffering. Continuously performing bad postural habits is going to deepen the severity of discomfort that you experience, but it’s not going to be an issue you need to attend a meeting with your physician for. 

Extensive exercise in the Trapezius area of your back can also lead to muscle pains in your neck, but again this isn’t going to cause any medical emergency.

If you’re looking for information on how to avoid developing this condition, you can try and perform proper posture at your place of work. Visiting a chiropractor can be constructive therapy for many individuals suffering from neck pain, if you’re curious, you can read more about the advantages of chiropractic work.

This is a more solution-based approach. If you’re constantly having neck pain and taking daily Advil, you’re only going to temporarily treat your pain without removing the cause.

When Not To Worry About Back Pain

Improper posture is going to be on the list of non-concerns for back pain as well as neck pain. It’s a non-concern in the sense that it doesn’t pose an immediate medical emergency, but it can lead to debilitating symptoms over the course of time. If you’re exercising, you’ll especially want to focus on posture when it comes to your back.

For instance, over the holidays you had taken a break from weightlifting due to fluctuation in gym hours. Eager to get back into the routine, you attempted to dead-lift the same amount of weight you had before your break. In result, you got a few creak in your back which resulted to walking like an old man for a week. It definitely didn’t constitute a medical emergency, but it was an example of how back pain can be debilitating.

Focusing on proper posture, and potentially visiting a chiropractor can be beneficial to some causes of lower back pain. The vast majority of lower back pain issues in adults cannot be pointed to a specific attributable cause.

Chiropractors, in a lot of instances, have the ability to find similar problems among those with lower-back pain, and assist you in recovery. In peer-reviewed research chiropractic approaches have been identified as successful in providing relief to discomfort, so don’t discredit this approach immediately.

When to Worry about Back and Neck Pain

It’s a bit difficult to find an objective point where you should be worried in a subjective experience. If you experience any immediate or acute distress in your neck or back from an impact injury, it is recommended that you seek medical attention. If you have a history of rheumatoid or psoriatic arthritis in your family, you should also seek a physician’s treatment.

If you’re elderly, you could be experiencing osteoarthritis as well. If you’re at all concerned that this could be a medical issue, always seek a physician’s help. It’s far better to know that you do or don’t have a medical problem than to try and bear the burden of discomfort and potentially exaggerate an injury that could be solved.

Back and neck pain are common problems among the majority of the population. They act as weight-bearing points in our body and are vulnerable to comprise in their structural integrity. Any deviation in proper posture over a long course of time is going to impact the ability of your neck and spine (back) to perform their functions correctly.

Luckily, with a few changes in your posture, and maybe seeking alternative therapies such as chiropractic work, you can prevent and remediate this discomfort. Of course, if you’re ever involved in any sort of impact injury, or you have cause for concern that this pain is a medical issue, seek treatment from a licensed physician. Lots of us hate going to the doctor, but it’s better to seek treatment while it’s an option, rather than being forced to, by the need later down the road.