Lower Back Pain Remedies That You Might Not Have Tried
- Apr 29
- 4 min read
If you live with chronic lower back I’m sure that you’ve tried a whole raft of remedies. You might find that your physio exercises don’t really help much; that benefits from a massage only last a day or so; you may also be at your limit for steroid injections. I am sorry, that sucks. There are other things to try and you will get through this. Until then..
How’s Your Gut Health?
When scientists studied poo samples of people with and without chronic lower back pain they found significant differences in their gut microbiota. They theorised that systematic inflammation linked with lower back pain had caused the dysbiosis. There’s also the gut brain axis to take into account. Pain is created in the brain but it can be reinforced by the gut. These researchers proposed that probiotic supplementation, dietary modifications, and fecal microbiota transplantation might support lower back pain patients. Fermented foods and drink, increasing fibre and decreasing processed food and red meat consumption all support gut health. It might be worth trying this for a month to see if it helps.
How About Your Vision?
Oculomotor training is a fancy term for eye exercises. If anything is off with our vision the brain goes into a protective mode. This often results in increased tension in the neck and shoulders which feeds down into the lower back. There’s also a correlation between people living with chronic lower back pain and their visual and motor neural circuitry. This study found that brain scans could classify 79.3% of chronic lower back pain patients through observing the enhanced links between their primary visual network and their somatosensory/motor areas.
If you already have back pain, adding an extra danger signal of dysfunctional vision will amplify the brain’s protective signalling. Try holding your head still and moving your eyes up, then down, on the diagonals, up and down, and in a circle each way. If you have areas of slow uncoordinated movement or jumps over some spots then you need to train your smooth tracking. Try the same thing keeping your eyes on one spot but moving your head in all the directions. Try this with one eye. There are many variations to experiment with. This picture from this website gives more examples.
Are You Sleeping OK?
Yes lower back pain makes it harder to sleep, but people who have baseline poor quality sleep and then develop lower back pain - take longer to recover. Poor sleep includes shorter sleep duration, greater difficulty falling asleep, and greater fragmentation of sleep.
Poor sleep, insomnia, and sleep deprivation are all linked to higher intensity lower back pain. We all know what we should do to get a better night's sleep - This CAMHS infographic has some reminders - in case you've forgotten 😉
How’s your Breathing?
How easy is it for you to breathe through your nose? Do you feel like most of your breathing involves your neck shoulders and upper chest? It might be that your diaphragm is tight which will contribute to muscle tension in your core. It might be that your fight-or-flight breath pattern is telling your brain to keep protecting you with pain. You might not be self regulating. It’s possible that your respiratory muscles and organs might be weak. Essentially, if you’re not breathing well, then all sorts of things can go wrong.
This systematic review and meta-analysis agrees that breath work is a good tool for lower back pain management. However, the amount of good quality scientific evidence for breath work is limited. My rebuttal for that is that there are no negative side effects to breath work. You can do it anywhere, anytime and it’s absolutely free. I have a whole page of recorded meditations on my website that I encourage you to work through. You can start with this one if you’d like?
And Your Stress Levels?
I suspect that I don’t need to write anything more here. We both know that stress is a huge trigger for ALL pain. This simple image is of the pain stress fear cycle, which is a pretty awful self perpetuating circle. This slightly more complicated image illustrates the way that threat learning reinforces pain.
Stress is a huge player in threat learning because it triggers cortisol. The brain is biased to pay attention to events that trigger cortisol because they have historically been connected with keeping us alive; escaping from a bear for example. Pair a period of intense stress with a movement or activity, (such as bending and twisting) which triggers a jolt of pain. The brain is biased to pay attention to this activity and this discomfort. It encodes bending and twisting as a threat. We then adapt our behaviour (avoidance, modification, worry) every time we bend and twist so that a fairly harmless movement has now become a conditioned stimuli that elicits a conditioned response.
gradual and graded exposure to the stimulus reinforces the message that bending and twisting are safe movements.
Self care isn’t selfish. Make sure that you are balancing your stress with downtime for hobbies, friends, or something you enjoy.
And there you go.
Sometimes where it hurts isn’t actually the source of the problem. It might be that you need to address the bigger picture before your pain goes. I’m sorry that your back hurts. This will pass and you will get through it. Until then: look for small pieces of joy, wherever you can find them; breathe; eat better; and prioritise your sleep.
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