Many are familiar with this painful sensation, when, after an unsuccessful or simply too sharp movement, pain appears – somewhere a nerve is pinched. Most often it occurs in the arm, leg, or back. What to do if a nerve is pinched?
A pinched nerve in the back: what to do?
First of all, you need to understand the cause of the pinched nerve. At first glance, the symptom is the most common – a sharp pain. However, it can indicate a number of diseases that you did not even know about and are unlikely to be able to diagnose yourself. A pinched nerve occurs when the nerve roots are squeezed, which exert too much pressure on the surrounding tissue.
Most often, the cause of such a problem can be either an excessive load on the back or osteochondrosis.
Let’s figure it out in order. Our spine is very strong and our back muscles are some of the largest in the body. All this allows you to work with serious loads without health consequences, if, of course, you do it correctly. The trouble is that very few people know how to do this. The most common mistake is trying to lift a load with your back bent while trying to straighten your lower back. The greater the load, the higher the chance of pinching the nerve. If the back is not overloaded, then the risk is minimal. If the cause is osteochondrosis, then everything is much more serious. With this disease, problems arise with the intervertebral discs, which become less elastic and begin to press on the nerve endings.
What to do if a nerve is pinched in the back? Of course, you need to take the load off your back. Let your spine rest. It is best to lie on your back and relax. If the pain persists, you need to roll over onto your stomach. The hardest part is to relax your lower back, but you yourself will feel how to do it. When the pain goes away, you need to fix your back. It is good if you have a special corset, but any dense material will do – for example, a stole or a towel.
After that, you can try to lie down at home, use relaxing ointments and woolen clothes, but it is better to go to the doctor after all. And the sooner you do this, the better it will be for your back.
Deputy chief physician for the medical department of the GKB im. S.P. Botkin of the Moscow Department of Health, neurologist, Ph.D.
– The main cause of neuralgia is damage to the vertebral discs, and only secondarily, then additional factors: hypothermia, awkward body position, inadequate physical activity.
In the case of acute neuralgia, drugs are prescribed to relieve pain. You cannot self-medicate or endure pain – it can go into a chronic phase and turn into a serious illness when standard analgesics no longer work. Then completely different drugs are used – antidepressants and antiepileptic drugs. Both at the acute stage and at the chronic stage, it is possible to discuss various kinds of surgical interventions that block the source of neuralgia. If the cause is a lesion of the spine, then treatment is possible from neurosurgical to conservative, physiotherapy exercises, adequate physical activity (swimming pool, healthy lifestyle) can be prescribed. It is not worth treating any pain syndrome on your own. Sometimes obvious things, such as typical intercostal neuralgia, can indeed be a manifestation of acute myocardial infarction. Such things are not joked about; if something is sick, you need to consult a general practitioner who will exclude the whole range of life-threatening pathologies.
Igor Lesnikov, Anna Gerasimenko