Back spasm from hell… Tips

Yes, see a physio. They will manually work the problem area, and it might not be obvious to you as referred pain can mean it’s another related muscle. They might use some other equipment to stimulate recovery – eg ultrasound. Then most importantly you will then be on an exercise programme to strengthen the injured area.

is there a risk that you continue to do things which make the injury itself worse, not better?

This is what worries people, but it’s very highly unlikely things will be made worse and the opposite is more likely. Backing off when things hurt makes you more sensitive to pain, and this becomes a viscious cycle (which drugs, massage, exercise – if you have the confidence to do it – can help to break).

Did my back in the gym once, made it worse then driving to London through gales, then a big night out. Could barely walk across the room in the morning, sweating with pain, which wasn’t great as I had to pick up a couple of my daughter’s friends to drive back north for her birthday. Friend I was staying with got his GP boyfriend to phone me, flat on my back on the livingroom floor. He was going to send over strong opioids of some sort, but said I’d almost certainly just torn a muscle or tendon or something sending back into spasm, and that exercising and generally just pushing on would not make anything worse.

Power of the mind: by the time we’d finished talking I was on my feet, still hurting but basically fine. Strange.

Occasional back issues just go with cycling and surfing, though I don’t think I suffer compared to most my age. I do a 10 min routine most nights these days, pissing off my wife, involving foam ball, then downward dog into cobra type moves a physio showed me.

Holistic approach definitely required – my pilates instructor told me all sorts of things about the body, mind and soul that I didn’t know, and was very keen I got back on my back.

But only after rest, allowing the initial, chronic inflammation to subside – anything before that would have aggravated it, slowing recovery. Doing a load of sit-ups to ‘release the pressure’ for example? Yeah, nah.

Knowing *what* you are dealing with, and what you are *not* dealing with, seems like an obvious first step to me, hence the MRI suggestion. Which, apart from anything else, gives an over-imaginative brain some parameters within which to work and obviously relies on some expert analysis and interpretation, because my spine looked like a neglected building site to my untrained eye.

Does diazepam address the source of the pain or just mute the systems that report it?

Pain is literally all in the mind, so Diazepam, which relaxes you, will subdue the brain’s effort in making the muscles spasm. Spasms are supposedly caused by unusual nerve feedback from an area and the brain goes ‘that doesn’t look right’ and locks everything up as a protective mechanism. It could be absolutely nothing happened at all and you just extended range of motion a bit more than normal and you brain flipped out (I’ve done it stretching). Worrying about it a lot (as anyone one would) will reinforces the whole process, making it worse. Anything which relaxes you will reduce the spasm effect to some extent (whether you notice depends on how much etc).

It’s the whole ‘sharp’ dagger thing as you twist that is awful.

I think rest and then move is a good policy. Repeat. You don’t want to seize up but you don’t want to be in constant pain either.