Back Pain Support Group
Back pain is one of the most common reasons people seek medical care. In fact, about 3 in 4 adults will experience back pain during their lifetime! The term back pain includes pain affecting the neck, midback and low back. Acute back pain may begin suddenly with intense pain but typically lasts fewer than three months. Usually, chronic back pain is persistent, steady, and...
Im finally going to the doctor here in two days and am nervous what he is going to say. I was diagnosed with multi-level degenerative disc disease 6 years ago in my lower back. Now the pain is on my entire right side of my neck upper, middle and lower back and my leg feels like its going to fall off. That's basically what im going to tell him. Im just wondering what to expect. If anyone has any ideas of what im about to go through i would appreciate hearing it alot. Also any ideas on how to treat the pain on my own would also be helpful as is i take about 6 alieve a day idk what else to do and i use about a whole tube of muscle rub and it just doesn't work anymore. Thank you all for your time and interest in reading this and posting a response.
Hopefully your dr visiti went well? Does heat or cold help you any? They do have that product that seems to help some people-the one that you slap the patch on and when you push a button it sends heat or something thru your painful area...
Reading between the lines of your post I get the same cold chills I got right before talking to my ortho about 2 months ago. I was out of options (or so I thought), so I decided to go alternative and try PEMF. After some research and self-experimentation I believe I can say with confidence that at least some types of PEMF work very well for degenerative spinal pain. I didn't get into my symptoms in my posts too much, but I think I was experiencing things similar to what you described, just lower on my back and it involved mostly my legs. Anyway, bottom line is I found one very modern type of PEMF called ICES. You can google search "ICES PEMF" to find several competing suppliers online. Just ignore the ones that are not ICES because in my opinion they cost too much and they don't really seem to work well (my experience, yours may differ of course). I wrote a lot more about my experience with ICES on my discussion "Out of options...anyone try PEMF?" in this back pain support group.
I really hope this helps you. It has changed my life (but maybe I am just the lucky one), so now I am on a crusade to figure out the real deal with ICES technology. I am trying to figure out their FDA status and plan, impossible to find on the internet as modern PEMF devices are not generally FDA approved. Only the old PEMF technologies have FDA approval (they use pre-1976, disco-era technology), due to the FDA 510K loophole. Imagine if all of our computers were federally limited to use only technology available before 1976..... there would be regrettable unintended consequences to say the least.
As for your meds: alieve is bad stuff for me, causes changes in my cognition and I lose gaps of time. The only meds that worked for my severe back pain the past 3 or 4 years were tramadol and of course oxycodone. But with the ICES treatment I have reduced or eliminated both of those in the past week, and the pain is LESS than when I was on the meds!!!
But this was just my experience with ICES. The other PEMF systems did not work nearly so well for me. But some people have had better luck with them than I did.
Anyway, I hope this is helpful.