Back Pain

Chiropractor Callum Sibbald is helping patients in Basingstoke who suffer from back pain.

Lower Back pain can be very painful and at times very debilitating. Some of the patients that present at our office have severe changes in their posture due to the pain, which can be agonising with movement. They may be bent forward or sideways from the waist up. In many patients the pain can refer into the buttocks and down the leg.

Patients sometimes describe the pain to be like a “tooth ache in the thigh”. At times the pain can refer into the calf and the foot and is described as sharp or shooting. This can sometimes be referred to as sciatica. In some conditions the patient experiences numbness down the leg or in parts of the leg and foot, or a pins and needles type sensation. Muscle strength in the leg can also be effected and cause weakness in the legs.

When we examine patients with these types of conditions we find a build up of trigger points  in the muscles of the lower back and the buttocks. Tigger points are very tight bands of muscle and connective tissue, with hyper sensitised pain receptor interwoven into them. When pressure is applied to these trigger points it can feel like a red hot poker is being driven into the muscle, and at times the pain refers to other regions such as the legs and imitates the leg pain that accompanies the back pain.