Dr. Dave explains why neck and back pain recovery takes time: the longer your spine has been misaligned, the harder it is to fix. Quick fixes don't work because healing requires addressing cumulative damage, not just your age. A proper assessment and tailored plan beat the cycle of pain returning.
Chapters
One of the biggest questions we get at the clinic is how long is it going to take to get better? And of course everybody wants to be better yesterday, now more than ever. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Dave, Toronto Neck and Back Pain Clinic. We live in this quick fix disposable— when it comes to our healthcare, I think some of those expectations have spilled over into getting ourselves better when we don't feel or aren't as healthy as we'd like to be. However, there are some limitations to that desire and those expectations. Now, if someone comes in and their spine is just not sitting and moving properly, it hasn't been like that for too long and everything else is good, they're healthy otherwise, then maybe one visit. It can happen that your neck or back pain does go away in one visit. However, that's at one end of the spectrum. If that spine, for whatever reason, has not been sitting and moving right long enough, the parts could now be damaged. There could be some structural issues going on there and they're that will limit how much recovery we can. That doesn't mean you can't get recovery. It's just a question of how much can we get and how long will it take. And certainly the further someone is down that progression, it would be logical to think maybe it's going to take a little more work than someone who hasn't been further down that progression. Now that's simple enough and most people can accept that. What's harder to accept is that it's not an age-related phenomenon. It's a time-related phenomenon. So if your spine has not been sitting and moving right for some time, it may be harder to correct. And that can happen early in life, it can happen later in life, it can happen whenever in life. And the other thing that we don't always realize is that that problem has not just been happening since we felt it. Like many other health conditions, it has a lead-up time. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes— we're kind of accepting of and understand that we didn't develop those conditions overnight. They come down to lifestyle, genetics, things that have been brewing for some time. Neck and back pain can be the same. We may not have felt that micro trauma, that small buildup of stresses and strains, bumps and bruises and bangs building up in there. Discomfort may have come and went, but the problem did not, and it's slowly been progressing until one day, either because of some incident or even seemingly out of the blue, that problem has now surfaced or resurfaced but is not going away, is worse than before, and finally we gotta go see someone and take care of it. But that condition may take longer, even though we've only started feeling it now, to get better than we would like or expect it to based on how we felt. Right? So those are some variables. You will get better. Many, many people get better from neck or back pain no matter how good or bad it is, but it does involve some patience. It does involve following some steps. It doesn't necessarily need to be long-term, but it might be depending on how good or bad things are. And that's the value of getting checked so you can determine what your variables are in your case and try to follow a plan as short and concise and as rapid as you can possibly get it to be, of course, but also to do enough so that you're not on a roll rollercoaster ride of that problem coming and going. You'd like to get rid of it.
