Why Lower Back Pain is Not Just All in Your Head

Many people, when they begin experiencing back pain, can not always put a finger on exactly where it hurts and why. There is just a nebulous, vague, hurt area and a feeling of soreness in the lower back. They may be able to change their posture to be able to lift, or they may be able to stretch their back here and there in order to decrease the discomfort. But too often, these are only temporary measures, and the pain in their back will soon return.

Making the issue even more difficult is that doctors and clinicians may not be able to diagnose exactly what is wrong with a single person's back. Fractures in the bones of the spine or damage to ligaments or muscle tissue may be difficult to spot with any contemporary measurement devices. Even EMGs and X-rays have been shown to be inadequate in finding the cause of lower back discomfort. This then begs the question: are many instances of back pain just psychological?

This may seem to be the case in a large number of people suffering from back pain who are unable to point to exactly where they hurt, have no obvious tissue damage, and do not seem to get better over a period of weeks or months. But even with all of these factors, back discomfort is rarely just a perceptual condition. The myth that back pain is "all in your head," though, persists mainly because of two deficiencies in the systems we use to diagnose and treat back pain.

First, because people are often unable to point to a specific part of their back that is hurting them, they may be assumed to have imagined the whole episode. But pain often radiates throughout the body, being felt in areas that may not have been involved in the original injury and may be far from the damaged tissues. This can be experienced in jaw pain caused by a decayed tooth, knee pain due to lack of hip mobility, and lower back discomfort that is felt in general rather than in one small, specific area.

Second, as mentioned previously, diagnostic tools are simply lacking when it comes to examining the tissues of the back and joints of the spine. The more widely available technology for diagnosing back pain has been shown in several studies to have significant limitations. Both X-rays and computed tomography (CT) scans are used to get an indication of what is going on in a person's back, but both of these tools have been shown to miss fractures and tears. Thus, the current state of medical technology is failing back injury sufferers.

So the myth that people who experience back pain are just crazy or imagining it is just that -- a myth. It is based on the fact that the human body is often inadequate at diagnosing its own disorders as pain is referred from one area to another or is felt in general instead of in specific places. And second, the myth persists because the most widely-used medical technology is simply not up to the task of allowing doctors to help people with back pain correctly diagnose their problems.