Category Archives: Back Pain

Why Do I Have Back Pain When I Sleep?

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This is a good question. It seems like when you’re sleeping, you’re laying down, you’re resting, that pain and those kind of symptoms would be less. But in some patients, they have worse back pain when they’re sleeping. So let’s take a moment to look at the final structure. This is the spine. You can see here you have disks in between the bones. These disks are really important because they act like shock absorbers, they allow for movement, and they can get injured. When they get injured, it’s like a sprained ankle. So what happens when you sprain your ankle? It swells up, right? Same thing happens to the disks. That swelling can be kept in check by moving around and by going through your day.

And then when you lay down at night to go to sleep, that pressure of you being in gravity and your weight kinda goes away. And that pressure’s been keeping the swelling in check. So you lay down and it just swells up. That swelling causes a lot of pain, and it causes a lot of pressure on the nerves that live right next to the disks. It’s really common to see that patients who have more pain while they’re sleeping, part of it has to do with the sleeping position, too. This is definitely a factor.

The best position I could recommend if patients can adhere to it, because everybody has a sleeping position that they have ingrained in their routine and it’s really hard to break that sometimes. But sleeping on your side with a pillow between your knees, and a pillow on your head, that keeps your head in the middle instead of doing this. The pillow between the knees kinda acts like a kickstand. It keeps you from rolling and twisting at night. That twisting, the disk does not like the twisting, especially with the swelling, so that helps a lot. Typically, we’ll see a big improvement in these symptoms with chiropractic care, and also with a change in the sleeping position. Pain usually will abate in the morning gradually as you move around, and it kinda pumps that inflammation, that fluid away from that area. But we wanna see a more sustained, a more long-term healing and fix for this problem. And chiropractic care can definitely help with rehabbing these disks that have been injured.

I’m Dr. Steven Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic (in Petaluma, CA), and this has been your Health Minute.

Is Back Pain Normal? A Response From A Petaluma Chiropractor

Is my back pain normal?

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Well no, it’s not normal in the sense that normal means your body’s functioning properly. I guess still that’s not entirely true because your body is functioning properly, giving you that signal of pain. So pain, back pain or any other symptom, is just a signal that something’s out of balance or something’s not working right in your body. It’s like an alarm system that goes off letting you know there’s something that needs to be addressed. I’ll just read a couple stats off about back pain. 31 million Americans experience low-back pain at any given time. There’s another fact. Low back pain is the single leading cause of disability worldwide, according to the Global Burden of Disease published in 2010. Back pain is the most common reason for missed work. One half of all Americans admit to having back pain symptoms each year.

There’s a whole lot of stats that go on and on. But it is a very prevalent problem. And so it’s obvious that for a lot of people back pain is normal, their normal experience. When we can figure out what’s causing that problem, instead of just giving painkillers, anti-inflammatories, injections and things like that to mask or cover up the symptom, we get really some results when we can remove that cause. Chiropractic is a great, safe, drug-free intervention that can help tremendously with back pain. And it does so without the use of opioids and all these other toxic drugs. I highly encourage you to seek out a qualified chiropractor to have your spine checked because there is something causing your pain. Whether that is something that can be fixed and that your body can heal from, a qualified chiropractor could tell you and can help you out with that. I’m Dr. Steve Battaglino with Battaglino Family Chiropractic, urging you to get your spine checked.