Thursday, June 20, 2013

How Stress Can Cause Back Pain and Disc Problems


We live in a world today where there is a lot of stress. Most of us are constantly pushing ourselves to the limit and finding little time to rest. Your adrenal glands are made to help you handle stress. For example they respond in a time of crisis by releasing adrenaline into the body. The adrenals also release other hormones to help you combat stress and cope with a stressful life. Biochemically the hormones that are released under stress actually can effect the ligaments in your back making a disc rupture more possible, and letting the back fall out of alignment easier.

I am a chiropractor in the Denver area and have seen some people respond well to chiropractic care and some not respond well. When I incorporated treating adrenal function and stress management into back pain I saw a great increase in the amount of people getting better. It became obvious when looking at biochemistry what was going on.

Every time your body moves there are inflammatory cytokines that are released from the motion. After you have inflammation your body then needs to anti inflame and heal. If there is an inability of your body to create a healing cascade then you are more prone to joint damage and disc rupture. The hormones that allow you to heal are made from your adrenals and impacted by your pituitary and hypothalamus. What is interesting is those hormones are effected by stress. So the more stress you have the more prone to injury you may become and the less likely you are to heal. A study done by the department of psychobiology at the University of Trier in Germany found just that. What this study found was the more stressed a person was the more probable they were to not heal well from surgery of the low back. What we can take from that is not only is healing from surgery delayed also healing in general is delayed including in the low back and discs.

There was a wonderful researcher named Hans Selye that studied the stress response in great detail. He found the adrenal glands became larger and less efficient, the immune system was weakened and healing was decreased. It becomes very important in many medical problems to understand how to increase the function of the adrenals, hypothalamus, and pituitary not just for back pain but for healing in general. I recently had a man that was severely immobilized and told he would need spinal fusion as the only option for his low back disc problem. When we supported the adrenal function he became pain free and started playing tennis. The body is a miracle with what it can do we just need to deeply understand its function to allow it to do its job. If you have questions regarding this article you can email me.

Links

Steriod Hormones and ligament rupture- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15733636

Adrenals, Pituitary, and Hypothamus and healing - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15733636

Thanks for reading.
Dr. Kennedy, D.C.
http://www.kennedywellness.org

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