What Causes Back and Neck Pain?
Back and neck pain are often due to soft tissue damage from acute sporting injuries or degeneration caused by wear and tear or overuse.
Muscle strains are a common cause of back pain in active people. They can happen if you overstretch yourself to make a shot or reach a ball. They can also happen when you lift too heavy a weight during training, or twist awkwardly.
Degenerative conditions develop when the discs and vertebrae in your spine degrade with age or wear because you’re making the same movements repeatedly. They then put pressure on the nerves in your spinal cord that results in pain.
Some of the causes of back and neck pain that The Woodlands Sports Medicine Centre treats include:
- Spinal stenosis
- Degenerative disc disease
- Disc herniation
- Spinal fractures
- Sciatica
- Scoliosis
- Nerve compression
- Musculoligamentous strain
- Spondylolysis
- Spondylolisthesis
Your neck is vulnerable to damage from trauma, like a high-speed impact that can make your head move violently forward and back, causing whiplash injuries.
It’s also common to injure your neck by sleeping with your neck out of line or have neck pain because of high stress levels causing very tense muscles.
How is Back and Neck Pain Diagnosed?
To diagnose the cause of your back or neck pain, your specialist at The Woodlands Sports Medicine Centre carries out a comprehensive physical exam to look for signs of misalignment or tissue damage.
They assess how well you can move and want to know all the details of how you incurred the injury and what your symptoms are.
To help confirm a diagnosis and assess the damage to your back or neck, your specialist uses on-site diagnostic imaging technologies such as:
- X-rays
- MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans
- CT (computed tomography) scans
- EMG (electromyography) tests
- Bone density scan
Once they find the cause of your back or neck pain, they can create an appropriate treatment plan.
How is Back and Neck Pain Treated?
In most cases, both back and neck pain respond positively to conservative treatment methods. Your initial treatment plan might include therapies such as:
- Activity modification
- Cold packs
- Heat packs
- Anti-inflammatories
- Pain-killing medication
- Muscle relaxants
- Physical therapy
If your symptoms aren’t improving, you might benefit from spinal injections. There’s a range of injections available that target different areas of your neck or back. They typically contain an anesthetic or opioid to relieve pain and a steroid medication to reduce inflammation.
If your symptoms still aren’t improving after following a course of moderate treatment, surgery could be an option. Some patients benefit from less invasive options like implantable pain devices like spinal cord stimulators and pain pumps, or radiofrequency ablation.
The possible surgeries you might need for back and neck pain include:
- Discectomy
- Spinal fusion
- Laminectomy
- Laminotomy
- Microdiscectomy
- Foraminotomy
- Debridement of the spine
- Vertebroplasty
- Kyphoplasty
- Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS)
The Woodlands Sports Medicine Centre surgeons are highly skilled in carrying out minimally invasive back and neck surgery. This approach causes less tissue damage and pain and enables you to recover faster.
If you have back or neck pain, call The Woodlands Sports Medicine Centre today or schedule a consultation using the online tool.
