Back pain is a common disorder - most people will suffer back pain at least once in their life. Usually it is simply a muscle sprain, and will resolve with a brief period of restricted activity, cautious exercise, and over the counter medications. Sometimes back pain is more severe, or can last longer than a few days. In these cases, additional treatments may be indicated - physical therapy, chiropractic treatment, massage therapy, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory (NSAID=s), or muscle relaxants.

There are many factors that can contribute to back pain: muscle and ligament sprains, degenerative arthritis, disc degeneration, spinal instability, and compression fractures. Often many of these problems coexist. Complicating the diagnosis and treatment of back pain is the simple fact that virtually all people over 50, and many people over 30 will have changes of degenerative arthritis and disc degeneration on X-ray, MRI, or CT imaging of their spines. Most of these people are free of pain. The tendency is to attribute pain to visible findings on X-rays and scans, and to assume that correcting these abnormalities with surgery will fix the problem. This approach is too often an expensive failure, particularly if no attention is paid to appropriate conservative treatments, such as exercise and understanding of body mechanics, weight loss, physical therapy, chiropractic treatment, massage therapy, and NSAID.However, in some cases of persistent back pain from mechanical abnormalities of the spine, where adequate conservative treatment has failed, surgery may be indicated. Your surgeon will discuss with you whether or not you should consider surgery.