The 3 cats and three cows of the morning: how to get out of bed when your low back is really stiff and painful

We have had a lot of patients inquire about the best method to get out of bed and loosen up when they wake up with a lot of intense low back stiffness and pain. This is not an uncommon finding with patients who have underlying lumbosacral inflammation from new injuries or degenerative disc disease.

The brief video goes through 3 versions of the cat and cow, starting right on your back before getting out of bed, and gradually progressing through the seated version and into the traditional tabletop version. By the time you finally stand up, the pain is often 50% reduced. This allows patients, who normally dread getting out of bed because of the half hour of intense pain and stiffness, to work through gentle progressive active range of motion in a few minutes, and be able to be functional much quicker at sunrise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJdsrYrLS_g&t=3s

Can the low back cause abdominal pain ?

It's a question that has been posed to me on a couple of occasions. Obviously, abdominal pain can have many pain generating structures, and internal abdominal organs are going to be the primary source of pain. However, I have had many a case over my 30 years in practice where a patient came in with persistent vague lower abdominal discomfort that felt really deep, and had had a battery of tests from ultrasounds, endoscopies, colonoscopies, and a boatload of labs, without any explanation for the continued symptoms. In the process of working up the patient for some other symptoms (lower back with thoracic pain most commonly), the patient reports a substantial improvement in their long-standing abdominal pain when starting chiropractic care.

An older and wiser colleague who mentored me in my early career once said: "there is as much lumbar spine in the front as there is in the back". The point was that the posterior aspect of the lumbar spine gets the lion's share of attention, since the posterior structures such as the facet joints, and the posterior margin of the lumbar discs, have a higher density of fine discriminating pain sensors, and all the spinal nerves which exit posterior to the center of the vertebral body can basically only be compressed in the posterior half of the lumbar spine. However, this is not to say that anterior lumbar pain generating structures do not exist or that they are rare. Anterior lumbar disc herniations are clearly seen on MRIs. They do not often get the attention they deserve, since orthopedic and neurosurgical providers are more focused on spinal nerve compression. Anterior lumbar disc herniations and the pain they generate is going to be more vague, and have more of an autonomic pain component: pain, malaise, nausea, fatigue, cold sweats, etc. One of the distinguishing features of abdominal pain of anterior lumbar origin is that it is going to be triggered by positional and mechanical factors much more so than digestive triggers. In this scenario, a thorough chiropractic examination is certainly worth investigating if you or a loved one has been dealing with continued unexplained abdominal pain that has been medically investigated with no answers.

( image courtesy of Freepik)

Tennis Elbow ( even if you don't play tennis)

"Tennis elbow" is a term that actually encompasses a variety of different pathologies affecting the lateral elbow, and has been described by 1 of my savvy patient as "the most unglamorous yet truly painful and brutally persistent" condition of the upper extremity. You never really know how much you use your lateral elbow until you find yourself unable to do simple tasks such as picking up a cup of coffee without wincing in pain. You're not even thinking about playing tennis at that point...

In medical terminology, conditions of the lateral elbow are often referred to as "lateral epicondylitis". A catch all term for repetitive strain injuries of various soft tissues of the lateral elbow. The reality is a little more nuanced, since that piece of real estate is dense in many structures: wrist and finger extensor tendons, lateral collateral ligament, supinator muscles, lateral myofascial edges of the triceps, radial head, radial head bursa, and traversing branch of the radial nerve. The mechanisms of trauma can be repetitive overuse injuries, or can actually be triggered by an initial single trauma such as pulling too hard on a stuck object, setting the cycle for continued reinjury with normal use.

Traditional treatment of lateral epicondylitis involves a combination of supportive measures such as heat, ice, resting from aggravating activities, and light bracing with activities. It will work for some people, but the truth about tennis elbow is that it can be persistent for a really long time and not respond to those first-tier approaches.

One of the reasons for the poor response of tennis elbow cases to traditional approaches is that tennis elbow is often the proverbial "singing canary" for mechanical and myofascial problems upstream. In order for the elbow to properly do its job, especially during repetitive activities, it needs normal stability of the scapula on the upper thoracic spine and the external rotators of the shoulders. If both of these mechanisms fail to function properly, the elbow flexors and extensors will be working harder during normal activities. And eventually get injured.

When patient presents with persistent poorly healing tennis elbow symptoms with normal treatment,we will need to look at the following silent upstream problems:

– global position of the shoulder girdle, especially with a lot of rounded shoulders and protraction, and poor function of the shoulder blade muscles. Patients will often have "winging" of the scapula either when sitting or when using their arm.

– Alignment and function of the upper thoracic spine, for silence spinal functional lesions, especially those that cause continued flexion and loss of normal rotational joint play.

– Mechanical problems of the cervical spine that cause some low-grade irritation of the C5 and C6 nerve roots, since they are responsible for firing the stabilizing muscles on the inside of the blade, which are essential to offload elbow muscles during arm activities.

The bottom line is that an elbow pain is sometimes not just an elbow pain. Even with upstream problems, which will require chiropractic and myofascial interventions to the neck, upper back and shoulder blade, the elbow problem may have become a separate entity that needs co-treating in order to fully recover. Local treatments involve soft tissue therapies that help break up scar tissue, and improve blood flow to the affected areas that are often very fibrous, stabilizing kinesiotaping, active range of motion retraining etc. Ultrasound therapy can often be extremely useful short-term as well as infrared therapy as a home therapy. There are lots of options available, and there is no reason to wince every time you pick up your well-deserved morning cup of coffee.

( photo courtesy of Racool studio)

BAROMETRIC PRESSURE, PAIN AND MIGRAINE HEADACHES

I am almost seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on my weather app. We have literally been rolling in form 1 storm system into the next for 10 days now, and while I am quite exhausted by the amount of wet dog smells and residues that this has brought into my house, I realize this is a minor problem compared to what some of our patients have been experiencing in that timeframe.

Some patients have conditions that are significantly flared up by sudden severe or prolonged drop in barometric pressures that are associated with storm systems. It used to be considered an "old wives tales"that people could predict upcoming bad weather with the arthritic joints. Modern science has finally caught up with that erroneous assumption. We now know that some of the sensory receptors that are found in many of our joint capsules, whose job it is to send off positional signal to our balance centers, can be expressed in much higher numbers in previously damaged joints, and can have a lower firing threshold over time. This essentially can turn a body part into a mini barometer, and at times more accurate than the weatherman.

The 2 patient populations that seem to be most affected by these barometric pressure changes (there are actually several more but I do encounter them much less commonly), are patients with posttraumatic or osteoarthritis related joint hypersensitivity, as well as patients with migraine disorders.

The scenario often goes as follows: patient has had a serious trauma to the spine or an extremity joint like the knee or wrist, (trauma can be physical trauma or something like surgery), and noticed over time that the joint pain seems to flareup independent of any normally aggravating activities, but seem to coincide with a 12 – 36 hour window before a major storm event. For migraine patients, every other trigger being equal, they are much more likely to start a migraine cycle prior to a major weather event, or with successive storms as we've had recently. The mechanism of action in migraine patients is a little different than for patients with posttraumatic joint sensitivity. Many migraine patients have poor autonomic function, leading to abnormal vasodilation and vasoconstriction. For migraine patients, especially female patients who have a tendency to experience lower blood pressure, the low barometric pressure increases vasodilation, slightly lowers blood pressure, which can be enough of a drop in oxygen concentration in cerebral blood flow to push them over into the beginning of a migraine. Quite interestingly, I recently polled several of my chronic female migraine patients who have barometric sensitivity to find out what the cutoff seems to be for them, (you can find out the barometric pressure on just about any weather app), and it's been remarkably consistent between 28 and 30 mg.

The bigger question looming in everyone's mind is what you can do about it. It's no fun living at the whim of storm systems.

There is no great miracle solution for your body having rewired your peripheral sensory system, but there are couple of tools in the toolbox that may be useful to try

First, most of our chiropractic patients have empirically figured out that scheduling a chiropractic visit in the early phase of the symptoms will ward off the severity of the pain flare up. The chiropractic adjustments help mitigate the amount of fluid pooling that comes with loss of normal joint motion, normalizes joint position sensor activity, and in the case of migraines, stimulates a better autonomic feedback loop.

For joints including the spine, light compression can offset the drop in barometric pressure. Appropriate compression sleeves seem to be helpful for a lot of people. You have to find one that fits comfortably on the body area affected, one that you can wear during your normal activities without problem. There are many brands available and the scope of this blog is not to list them, but I have consistently heard good results from patient to use the copper infused compression type. They do have some options for the spine such as trunk sleeves, which will fit over the low back, and they often have compression base layers that can do the same thing. I would have to say that the cervical spine can be the harder area to fit with a good compression support.

Things are much trickier for patients with migraine disorders. However I would say that compression is also a really useful to to maintain blood pressure, and can be used in the form of compression stockings in the lower extremity (preventing fluid pooling in the lower extremity and maintaining normal circulatory volume), as well as a compression shirts. In addition, anything that can help maintain blood pressure above 100 systolic is helpful: increasing natural salt and electrolytes intake every 2 or 3 hours with proper hydration at the beginning of a migraine cycle, nitric oxide supplementation to improve peripheral delivery of oxygen to the brain, certain of autonomic/vagal breathing exercises to improve proper vasoconstriction feedback loop. Some patients seem to respond favorably to caffeine -containing product to temporarily increase the blood pressure.

While we wait for the last of the storms to clear up, think about how you may be able to incorporate some of these new tools in self care to be less susceptible to the whims of the weather.

CAN I HAVE A PINCHED NERVE IN MY SHOULDER ?

It’s another 1 of those questions I field almost every day, and for which I finally decided to write a reference blog to direct patients to.

The short answer is yes, and the devil is in the complicated details. Patients will often ask that question when they're presenting with a type of shoulder pain that feels very "nerve like", and have been told that there is no pinched nerve in the cervical spine to account for the pain. It's important to note that a large proportion of shoulder pain can indeed be referred nerve pinching pain from the cervical spine.

If you want to get clinical, and if you consider the shoulder a broad area from the lower neck into the upper arm, from the clavicle to the shoulder blade, the number of peripheral nerves you can entrap is surprisingly high, but in this blog entry I wanted to focus on four neurological structures that are subject to impingement from functional shoulder disorders (misalignment, trauma, muscular imbalances especially): the brachial plexus, the suprascapular nerve, the long thoracic nerve, and the axillary nerve. As you can see from the various images, they are distributed in various parts of the shoulder girdle close to neuromusculoskeletal structures such as the shoulder joint, the clavicle, and various deep muscles of the shoulder. Of these 4 structures, the brachial plexus receives the lion share of the peripheral shoulder entrapment syndromes, because of the length of its path from the lower cervical spine into the upper arm, and the number of structures it has to traverse. It also gives rises to several of the secondary peripheral nerves. Incidentally almost all of the peripheral nerves travel alongside with correlating vascular structures, meaning that peripheral nerve entrapment syndromes also are often jointly vascular entrapment syndrome (with symptoms associated with decreased blood flow to an area). Developing shoulder entrapment syndrome can be both acute and chronic, often the result of long-standing postural shifting of the shoulder, as well as one trauma or acute sprains. Ultimately treating the underlying mechanism of nerve entrapment is the best way to address them.

Trigger point, myofascial pain and chiropractic

https://chiropracticscience.com/podcast/drjohnsrbely/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20015704/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23830709/

My nerdy self has recently discovered a new chiropractic research podcast on which I have been feasting during my long commute, even longer with all the summer road construction season. 1 of the episodes that caught my attention was on myofascial pain syndrome and trigger points. Soft tissue dysfunction has always been of great interest to me, 1 of the reasons for which I incorporated soft tissue therapy in my own clinical practice as well as partner with full-time massage therapist to complement our chiropractic treatment plan in many of our patients.

1 of the great debates within the scientific community is the pathogenesis (a big fancy word for root cause mechanism) of myofascial pain. We have a lot of theories but until recently, when new scientific methods of exploration and data recording have become available, not easily proven by the available research.

The chiropractic clinician being interviewed has been doing full-time research focusing on that area (thanks to our northern Canadian neighbors whose hard earned tax dollars have funded 35 full-time chiropractic research positions in higher education institutions). The idea behind 1 of the studies was to determine if trigger points are inherently the result of peripheral soft tissue insults, such as trauma, chronic mechanical overload, repetitive strain injuries etc., or if there may be more of a central mechanism of trigger point development predisposing to soft tissue in particular areas. This is a question especially relevant for chiropractors, since Empirically we have always found myofascial dysfunction to be jointly occurring with spinal distortion patterns in associated regions.

I'm amazed they were able to recruit volunteers for this particular study because the methodology of inducing trigger points was not particularly pleasant, and those of you who have used hot pepper creams or ever accidentally opened a can of bear spray on yourself can attest how brutally painful capsaicin can be, although innocuous in the long term. The researchers induced chemical irritation using capsaicin at the C5 spinal level, and watched for changes in soft tissue and myofascial sensitivity and tone in the areas associated with the C5 nerve root and dermatome. The study was striking, with extremely high reproducibility of trigger point and other myofascial distortion patterns along segmental distribution of the spinal segment injected. This would indicate that myofascial pain syndrome and trigger point formation is both a peripheral and central problem, meaning that myofascial pain should not be resolved with peripheral soft tissue therapies alone, but will require close attention to any sort of disturbance at the level of the spinal region upstream from the muscle pain, in order to achieve long-term resolution. Something that our profession has certainly empirically practiced for long time, and finally validated with some moderate research.

Chiropractic adjustments and core strength

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016147540600039X

Another great research article I came across during 1 of my educational podcasts. It really hit home because I've recently started to work with a few patients who have had significant recurrent lumbar injuries and showed up very frustrated to their initial appointment. In both instances I can remember, the patient had spent 3 months of intense physical therapy and core strengthening, but without achieving the desired stabilization of the lumbar spine during the routine activities of daily living, leading them to constantly finding themselves reinjured with simple things like grocery shopping and doing laundry.

The research in question is a small pilot study (to be followed with a larger scale double-blind larger cohort study) that examined the delay in deep abdominal muscle reaction time (the FFA mentioned in the study). This is a very important metric, since the idea behind core strengthening is to have our core musculature fire up automatically when we are doing our daily activities, thus protecting us from unwanted strains and injuries.

The study showed that adjusting a dysfunctional sacroiliac articulation resulted in a significant reduction in FFA, meaning that the patient's core muscles engage much more quickly during activities, without having done any new core strengthening. The theory behind the mechanism of action is that abnormal position and motion of the spine and pelvis can interfere with the normal feedback mechanism of core strength muscle control.

This certainly has been the empirical experience of chiropractors and their patients for many decades. Patients reports that following chiropractic care they can start resuming activities that have historically led them to reinjury for many years. And often before we even start setting up the patient for the appropriate home activities. The moral of the story is that if you feel that you've been exercising your core strength with very little return on investment, it may be a good idea to add chiropractic to your treatment plan.

Modernizing Medicare chiropractic coverage

MEDICARE CHIROPRACTIC MODERNIZATION LEGISLATION

The beautiful thing about being in practice for 30 years is that many of your patients will grow old with you. The not so beautiful part of reaching Medicare age is that chiropractic benefits suddenly revert to what they were 50 years ago, at the inception of chiropractic benefits under the Medicare act. For everyone except this particular age bracket over 65, chiropractic coverage has for the most part steadily improved over the last 50 years, to keep up with changes in education and scope of practice to include a large portion of the services offered by comprehensive chiropractic offices such as ours. And so it can be a bit of an unpleasant surprise for patients, and a bit of an administrative headache to communicate this unfortunate reality: Medicare chiropractic benefits are pretty skeletal, reduced to manual adjustments for spinal conditions only for the purpose of recovering from acute injuries or managing spinal conditions to the maximum medical improvement. It excludes evaluation and management codes, extra spinal treatment, and any supportive measures in addition to the adjustment that are done routinely in chiropractic offices. It also specifically excludes the management of chronic conditions, which make up the vast majority of presenting complaints for people over the age of 65. In summary, the current chiropractic Medicare benefits that were established by an act of Congress 50 years ago are grossly inadequate for the current standard of care in chiropractic practices. And the situation is grossly out of line with all of the commercial private insurance coverage that most people under the age of 65 receive.

We can grumble about it forever, but a more productive avenue for this unfortunate situation and the frustration it fosters for both patients and provider is to rectify the problem by aligning current chiropractic Medicare benefits with the standard of insurance coverage. A bill was introduced in 2023, S.799 Chiropractic Medicare Modernization Act, and is looking for more sponsors and most definitely from vocal grassroots patient support. If you or your loved ones have found themselves in the situation of encountering very limited Medicare chiropractic reimbursement, please contact your federal elected officials to voice your support for the bill. Your voice is valuable and carries more weight than that of the providers.

To locate your federally elected representative by ZIP Code:

https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative