My San Diego Chiropractic Office sees many people with lower back pain. Sometimes that lower back pain is accompanied by sciatica or leg pain, but more often than not the pain is concentrated in the lower back.

The reasons that people get lower back pain are numerous. Sometimes there is a traumatic history such as car accidents, work injuries and sports injuries; sometimes the reasons are less obvious. When an accident of some type is in the immediate history, there is an easy connection between that accident and the pain. However, the other contributing factors that cause the onset of low back pain can be less obvious.

Bad posture, improper lifting techniques and lack of proper support from your chairs or car seats can silently contribute to low back pain. Often times, when patients complain of lower back pain with no accident history, the cause of that pain is related to cumulative stress.

Let me explain why this happens. The joints in our backs and the muscles and ligaments that work to provide movement and stability of these joints are among the strongest in the body. When we lift improperly or assume poor postures, we stress the joints in our backs. Each individual stress doesn't affect us enough to generate pain. However, if we continually stress the same joints they will eventually become irritated and inflamed resulting in pain and muscle spasms.

Sometimes the pain is located more on one side of the back then the other. This pain can indicate that one of the sacroiliac joints has been affected by the injury. Occasionally the pain starts on one side and moves to the other side causing a band-like pain across the beltline area of the low back. This type of pain distribution is caused by the interdependence that the sacroiliac joints have on each other and the lower lumbar vertebra. In other words, all of these joints in the low back share muscles and ligaments that have a direct affect on each other.

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