Lower back pain is a topic I often like to discuss because it affects so many of my patients.  I feel that it’s important for my patients to understand why lower back pain occurs. Since it’s such a common condition, I feel everyone should have some basic knowledge about the subject and how it can be treated.

Generally, lower back pain is caused by age, disease, trauma, or a combination of these. For example, an older person who already has a certain degree of lower back pain may be involved in a car accident which leads to greater pain and more complications. Pain is usually centralized and located very low in the back. The severity of the pain is typically worse when sitting and reduced when walking.

The most common lower back pain I see in my office is caused by L5-S1 disc degeneration. Spinal vertebrae are separated from each other by discs that act as cushions. The L5-S1 disc is positioned between the fifth lumbar vertebra and the first sacral vertebra. Because the curve of the spine shifts at this location, significantly more stress is put on this disc than on others in the lower back.

Disc degeneration occurs as a result of trauma or from the normal aging process. Since pressure is naturally placed on this area of the back, traumatic impact can cause the disc to degenerate, resulting in pain and discomfort.  Someone who has been in a car accident and suffered impact to their back has a greater chance of developing L5-S1 disc degeneration.

Back pain sufferers can experience many different types of pain. Pain in the lower back is only part of the problem- patients can also experience unpleasant symptoms in the arms, legs, or neck, depending on which part of the back is affected. Some of these unpleasant symptoms include numbness, tingling, weakness and shooting pains.

Sciatica is a common type of pain caused by disc degeneration. Sciatica affects the sciatic nerve, a large nerve extending from the lower back and down the back of each leg. Shooting pains down the leg, weakness, numbness, and tingling are symptoms of sciatica. For some people, pain from sciatica can be severe and unbearable. For others, the pain might be infrequent and irritating, but has the potential to get worse.

Treating lower back pain is something we specialize in here at Monmouth Pain and Rehabilitation. We never give up on our patients; it’s our passion to help find an end to pain without surgery or long-term painkillers. Depending on the injury and type of back pain, we offer a range of treatment strategies:

Physical Therapy— focuses on reducing pain, increasing function and flexibility, building strength, and preventing pain in the future. Physical therapy for disc injuries includes the use of spinal decompression traction. Traction alleviates pressure on the nerves that are causing pain.

Chiropractic Care— has two main goals for back pain: to realign the spine to reduce pain and inflammation, and to increase motion in the joints of the spine to regain normal movement and function. Because chiropractic care is involved with the central nervous system, which includes the spine and parts of the body responsible for pain, it is especially appropriate for back pain.

Acupuncture—is great for the treatment of back pain because it helps decrease the stimulation of nerve cells that cause pain by releasing serotonin. Serotonin interrupts pain signals before they can reach the brain.  Acupuncture also provokes the release of endorphins in the body, which act as natural painkillers.

Pain Management— offers unique methods of pain relief before medications and surgery are necessary. For some patients, their back pain is so severe that it makes physical therapy and other practices impossible. At Monmouth Pain and Rehabilitation, we offer a few different methods of pain management. An example of one of these methods is:

-          Epidural Steroid Injections- administered right in our Red Bank office, provide very significant pain relief by reducing the painful inflammation that is irritating or compressing the spinal nerves. A long-lasting steroid is injected in the outermost part of the spinal canal, providing a calming, pain-relieving effect.

In my office, I see many different cases of back pain. It’s one of the most common reasons people seek health care. Millions of working days and countless hours of fun and exercise are lost due to back pain. At Monmouth Pain and Rehabilitation, we are ready to treat your back pain once and for all. Stop in our Red Bank office or contact us for more information.

Getting sick happens. As much as we fight to live a healthy life style, we can’t always seem to combat those germs that dwell around every corner.

At Monmouth Pain and Rehabilitation, we offer chiropractic services that help increase immunity and fight off sickness. Today I would like to talk about immunity and how chiropractic care can help boost immunity, promote the body’s natural healing ability, and raise its functionality to the highest limit. Immunity refers to the body’s ability to resist harmful microbes from entering the body. Harmful microbes are basically germs that cause disease in humans.

If the nervous system is not functioning as it should, it results in the breakdown of the immune system. This can lead to the body becoming susceptible to illness and viruses. Our chiropractic services at Monmouth Pain will locate and eliminate subluxations, which are spinal abnormalities that interfere with your nervous system by placing pressure on nerves.  You see, since the nervous system controls all functions of the body -including the immune system- chiropractic care can have a positive effect on immune performance.

My patients sometimes use being sick as an excuse to not come in for treatment. I strongly believe that sick patients have even more of a reason to come in for treatment. If you are sick, that means your immune system isn’t functioning at its highest capacity. We believe the body has the power to heal itself. Coming into Monmouth Pain and getting adjusted while you are sick is better than taking any over the counter medicine.

I believe that everyone can benefit from our chiropractic services in Red Bank, NJ. Chiropractic care is effective for a large range of illnesses and conditions. If you are healthy, chiropractic care can help maintain the function of your healthy immune system. If you are sick, chiropractic care at Monmouth Pain can boost your immune system and help you feel better, faster.

Spring brings warm weather, flowers and yes, sickness. Allergens are floating around in the air and diseases affecting your throat or nose have an impact on your chances of getting a cold virus. Now is a better time than ever to come into Monmouth Pain and receive treatment to boost your immune system. Chiropractic care is a healthy, drug-free option to relieving sickness.

Now is a great time to contact our office to find out how chiropractic care can help relieve your sickness. We’re currently offering a complimentary exam/consultation for new patients in our Red Bank pain management, physical therapy, acupuncture, and chiropractic office.

If you’re any type of athlete (professional or otherwise), you need to read the following information. A number of studies show that many of you are relying on over-the-counter pain medication as an ergogenic aid to enhance performance and/or relieve pain—and that this action can have serious health consequences.

Naturally, when it comes to activities that require endurance, athletes are always looking for new ways to become better competitors.

In particular, NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs), such as Advil or Aleve, are well- known for having anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects. It’s become apparent that many athletes are using these drugs before, during, and after competition.

At Monmouth Pain and Rehabilitation, we’ve spoken a lot on our blog about the dangers of over-the-counter medications. NSAIDs function by blocking prostaglandins—substances produced by the body that are responsible for protecting the lining of the stomach; regulating blood pressure; and mediating pain and inflammation.

Masking pain is never a good idea—it reduces the sensation of muscle soreness but does nothing to prevent injury to the muscles. Worse, one study* showed that long-distance runners who had taken ibuprofen before and while running showed more inflammation and other signs of immune system response than those who had not.

Those runners using the ibuprofen also had mild kidney impairment, dehydration, and something known as exertional hyponatremia, in which the delicate yet extremely important balance of blood/sodium concentration is disrupted to a dangerous degree. Some of the runners also suffered from minor endotoxemia, in which bacteria leaks from the colon into the bloodstream.

We told you the news was disturbing.

Athletic activities aside, the long-term use of NSAIDs can cause ulcers, gastrointestinal bleeding, and kidney damage.

Let’s talk about safe over-the-counter drug use. Those of you who do not have a history of ulcers, gastrointestinal bleeding, or kidney issues can safely use NSAIDs as a short-term method of relieving muscle soreness or minor injury.

If you’ve suffered any type of sports injury or you’ve been in pain for quite some time, it’s important to seek help. The longer pain continues, the more you are at risk for further injury or chronic pain. There’s never been a better time to visit our office; we are now offering a complimentary examination/consultation process ** as well as free, 30-minute massage for all new patients. We are a fully staffed multi-disciplinary pain management and rehabilitation office that provides:

• Medical Pain Management
• Physical Therapy
• Chiropractors
• Acupuncture

Contact our Red Bank rehabilitation office to learn more.

*Study completed by the Human Performance Laboratory at the North Carolina Research Campus.
** Valued at $245.00
***Valued at $60.00

Did you know that women are more prone to knee pain and injury than men? I thought we’d take a moment here to discuss the issues affecting women’s knees and why, if you’re a woman, you might be more likely to have knee issues than men.

You don’t have to be an athlete to incur the changes that cause runner’s knee or jumper’s knee. This injury—also called anterior knee pain—is caused by biomechanical issues.  You see, the width of the pelvis in women is such that it creates a particular type of angle where the leg and thigh bones meet. This angle, which is often sharper in women than men, may lead to alignment issues for the kneecap. The ligaments in a woman’s knee are also looser, which means that the muscles supporting the knee are not as strong.

Naturally, female athletes are particularly at risk, especially those who participate in sports or activities that require a lot of jumping or other movements that place stress on the knees.

Pregnancy is another reason that women experience knee pain. During pregnancy, a hormone known as relaxin softens the joints in order to prepare the body for delivery. A pregnant woman’s center of gravity also shifts. These two factors, combined with weight gain, create a perfect storm for knee pain—knee pain that may continue long after the pregnancy itself.

At Monmouth Pain, we’re really proud of the type of care we offer. With multi-disciplinary rehabilitation, we know that we’re providing the very best in every type of care necessary for the non-surgical treatment of knee pain. In fact, it is our goal to help all of our patients avoid surgery whenever possible.

What’s even better is that all of our treatment options are offered conveniently in one location in our Red Bank pain management/rehabilitation office. For knee pain, these might include:

• Medical Pain Management for Knee Pain
• Joint Injections
• Viscosupplementation
• Physical Therapy for Knee Pain
• Chiropractic
• Acupuncture (for faster healing and drug-free pain relief)

To learn more about Monmouth County knee pain options, contact us today. We’re currently offering a complimentary exam/consultation for new patients in our Red Bank pain management, physical therapy, acupuncture, and chiropractic office.

If you’re experiencing numbness or tingling in your feet or hand, Monmouth Pain can help. I’d bet that you’re probably feeling a little nervous about what’s going on with your body. If you have these symptoms, don’t ignore them. Our office has an in-house diagnostic process unlike any other. When we know exactly what’s causing your numbness, tingling, burning, or other abnormal sensations, we can create a plan to put a stop to them for good.

Monmouth Pain is board certified in Electrodiagnostic Nerve Testing—we perform nerve conduction studies for a truly accurate diagnosis. Once we have determined what’s going on with your body, our multi-disciplinary staff will work together to determine the very best solutions for you in our compassionate and highly competent environment.

We are a team of Pain Management Physicians, Physical Therapists, Chiropractors, and Acupuncturists dedicated to providing effective programs of pain management and rehabilitation while helping patients to avoid surgery and the unnecessary use of painkillers. This is known as ‘conservative’ care. Let’s not confuse the term conservative with ineffective or weak. We never give up on your condition—instead, we tackle it from every angle possible and with every tool currently available—from in-house cortisone injections to progressive physical therapy and acupuncture for (very real) symptom relief.

In particular, our physical therapy department has a number of treatments that are extremely effective in reducing numbness and tingling. In particular, these symptoms respond well to Low Level Laser Therapy. Also known as Cold Laser Therapy, this technology boosts blood flow to the affected area while accelerating cellular production, thereby promoting better nerve functioning and reducing numbness and tingling.

We also use Power Plate Machines for numbness/tingling—this is a really great way to wake up and stimulate the nerves. We’ve been so thrilled with our Power Plate, in fact, that we recently added several more to our physical therapy department.

Understanding Numbness and Tingling

These symptoms are part of a collection of disorders known as a neuropathy. More specifically, when the peripheral nervous system—which is the part of the nervous system separate from the spinal cord and the brain—incurs some form of damage, the symptoms of peripheral neuropathy occur.

In more simple terms, when the nerves that connect the spinal cord and the brain to the rest of the body are damaged or diseased, communication is compromised and a variety of symptoms might occur.

This is what you’re feeling when you have numbness in your hands or feet. Other symptoms include pain; ‘shooting’ pains; burning/freezing sensations; muscle weakness; sensitivity to touch; sweating; disturbed sleep due to pain; and the feeling that you are wearing a sock or a glove when you are not.

One of the most common causes of these symptoms is diabetes. Non-diabetic patients may experience peripheral neuropathy after some type of injury (sports injuries and auto accidents come to mind) as well as different types of infections or other disorders.

Let’s concentrate for a moment on symptoms caused by trauma. Most often, trauma-related peripheral neuropathy is known as mononeuropathy (involving a single peripheral nerve). Injury to a nerve or pressure on the nerve may cause symptoms, as might repetitive actions. Injury to the spinal discs often puts pressure on a nerve and causes the symptoms of sciatica, for example.

An injury of overuse, carpal tunnel syndrome is also a mononeuropathy. When this occurs, you might experience hand numbness, tingling, pain, and other strange sensations in the first three fingers (those closest to the thumb). Some carpal tunnel patients also experience a range of symptoms in the shoulder or arm.

These types of traumas and injuries are at the heart of what our practice does best—correcting the causes of pain and other symptoms in order to put and end to suffering. For example, when we use physical therapy, spinal decompression traction, chiropractic, and epidural steroid injections for disc injuries, we are able to stop the numbness, tingling, shooting pains, burning sensations, and weakness associated with sciatica.

Monmouth County Rehabilitation for Numbness and Tingling

If you have numbness, tingling, or any of the symptoms described above, please don’t hesitate to contact our Red Bank pain management office. We’d like to help you discover what’s causing your symptoms and to put you on the right track toward relief. Since we offer a complimentary initial exam, you’ve got nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Contact our office to set up an appointment or to learn more about how we can help.

If you’re at all like me, you’re getting tired of feeling cooped up for the winter. Let’s face it—time spent at the gym has never been a great substitute for a good run on the boardwalk.

When it’s Back Pain that’s slowing you down, the winter can be even worse.

Now is the perfect time to start treatment for your back pain—before the warm weather hits and you’re stuck on the sidelines in pain. To get you started, we’re offering complimentary, 30-minute massages to all new patients (returning patients will also receive a massage). When you come in to see us, we’ll also take any necessary x-rays and create a customized treatment plan—our gift to you.*

Don’t ruin spring by ignoring a problem that you can fix now. Springtime offers so many opportunities to get moving—gardening, running, tennis, surfing, etc.—yet all of these activities require that you be in decent shape. It’s hard to imagine the bending and lifting required of gardeners who are suffering from back pain, not to mention the sports injuries that could happen if you’re not careful about a previous injury or existing pain.

When springtime comes, a lot of people make the mistake of throwing themselves back into action at full speed, not stopping to consider that they may not have been as active all winter or that they’re suffering from back pain (or knee pain, hip pain, foot pain, etc.) that hasn’t yet been addressed. Other types simply throw in the towel when pain from an injury or from aging slows them down. Neither of these options is ideal.

For those of you not entirely familiar with our system of care for back pain, we provide conservative plans of pain management. Our goal is relieve your pain and fix what’s causing your suffering without surgery. We’re also dedicated to minimizing or eliminating the use of painkilling medications. The following options for care are provided in our Red Bank rehabilitation office:

• Medical Pain Management: Our physicians are top experts in the field of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. Incorporating this type of doctor into our practice has allowed us to expand the scope of our pain management offerings. We now offer in-house interventional procedures, including cortisone and/or anesthetic injections.

• Physical Therapy: Programs of physical therapy vary by individual and may include Therapeutic Exercise, Spinal Decompression, Laser Therapy, Ultrasound, Electrotherapy, and more. We’re also one of the very few physical therapy practices that provides PowerPlate exercise machines—technology that exponentially increases the benefits of therapeutic exercise.

• Red Bank Chiropractors: This healthcare specialty provides a hands-on, drug-free method of restoring movement while relieving pain. Chiropractors help back pain patients by realigning the spine and increasing motion in the joints of the spine. Our office in particular uses a type of chiropractic known as Chiropractic Biophysics (CBP), which uses a scientific, comprehensive approach to help patient achieve total spinal health.

• Acupuncture: As part of our commitment to providing healthy options for pain relief, we’ve turned to ancient—and proven—methods of pain relief. We’re thrilled to offer a combination of Eastern and Western techniques for relieving pain.

When it comes to back pain, the time to take initiative is now. We’d love to see you in our Red Bank rehabilitation office. Contact us today and we’ll get you set up with an introductory massage and find out what’s causing your back pain.

*Offers are valued at $60 and $245, respectively.

When I first moved to Red Bank in 1997 with my new wife, we had a lot of future ahead of us. In the fifteen years since, we’ve built our family of five and I’ve been incredibly privileged to serve so many of you in this community.

It’s funny how a place becomes a part of you. Anyone who is in a position of providing personalized, one-on-one healthcare can tell you of the particularly deep connection you begin to feel with the community you’re helping.

Here at Monmouth Pain, we’ve gone from a modest start as a one-room chiropractic office and expanded through the years to become a pain management/rehab center that offers Medical Pain Management, Physical Therapy, Acupuncture, and—of course—Chiropractors. I’m thrilled to offer more options for pain relief and rehab than ever before—and to more patients than we’ve ever worked with previously.

We’re thrilled to be in a position to give back to the community. In that spirit, we’ve brought in a massage therapist on Mondays and Wednesdays to give complimentary 30-minute massages to new patients.* We know that stress can be a major source of pain—we’d like to pick up the tab and help you to relax. We’ll even take your x-rays and sit down with you to discuss a treatment program that would be right for you.**

If you’ve been holding back on seeking care for your back pain, neck pain, etc., let’s consider NOW the time to start really living your life again. Too many people accept pain as a normal part of life, particularly during the aging process. At Monmouth Pain, we quite literally never give up on you. We will do everything in our power to help you find relief from pain and to fix the causes of pain with non-surgical treatment options. We’re also deeply committed to the proper use of painkilling medications (as a short-term method of providing relief when absolutely necessary).

If you’d like to take advantage of this special offer, contact us here or give us a call at 732.345.1377.  Make sure to get scheduled on Monday or Wednesday if the free massage interests you; we are also open Tuesday-Thursday as well as Saturday.

*Valued up to $60

**Valued up to $245

When it comes to painkillers, drug addiction has the ability to affect every type of person from all backgrounds. Let’s remember that drug deaths are now exceeding auto accident fatalities and gun deaths in this country. This part of the world has a serious prescription drug abuse problem that transcends all borders and socioeconomic factors.

The Good News: New Jersey Pain Management

It’s actually a really amazing time in the history of pain management—and not because of today’s drugs. In fact, we should get excited that we don’t need to rely on painkilling medications for relief.

To be clear, Monmouth Pain’s stance on drugs is to provide short-term relief through medication in cases where it is absolutely necessary. Please understand that doctors who are too quick to prescribe serious narcotic painkillers should be avoided. Even if we forget for a minute that painkillers use can be seriously addictive and potentially fatal, even normal use can cause damage to the body. We want to relieve your pain and fix what’s causing suffering while boosting the health of your body, not degrading it.

Pain management and rehabilitation should be undertaken thoughtfully, deliberately, and as a coordinated effort between healthcare practitioners. When done correctly, patients should not require long-term drug use for pain relief. In fact, using painkillers for long periods of time represents a failure of the pain management/rehabilitation system.

If you are in pain for any reason—injury, illness, age, etc.—Monmouth Pain offers a system of care that you may not have tried before. We believe in addressing the causes of pain (for example, treating a disc injury that may be causing back pain and/or sciatica) while also treating any other issues within the body that may or may not be related to your initial complaint. For example, we know that your neck injury and lower back pain could quite possibly be interrelated issues. There’s no point in treating one while ignoring the other.

We take extreme pride in our compassionate, multi-disciplinary system of care that offers all of the following healthcare modalities in one location:

• Medical Pain Management (including Interventional Pain Management techniques such as Epidural Steroid Injections);
• Physical Therapy;
• Chiropractors; and
• Acupuncture.

How It Works: Red Bank Pain Management

Let’s talk about how the rehabilitation and pain management system works in our office. Using the above-mentioned example, let’s say a patient came to us with sciatica symptoms. Sciatica is the term we use to describe the painful and disabling set of symptoms related to the irritation of the sciatic nerve. In many cases, sciatica is caused by issues with the spinal discs in the lower back.

For some patients, chiropractic care and physical therapy for a disc injury might be enough to correct the issue and put an end to pain, immobility, and other symptoms. Additional pain management can also be provided through acupuncture.

For other patients, the pain/symptoms may be too great to bear and it’s just not possible to rely on chiropractors or physical therapists for care. What happens now? Where do you go?

Here’s where a lot of problems occur. The next step taken may be a drastic and unnecessary move. Do you need surgery? Most likely, the answer is no. In fact, so many unnecessary and failed surgeries are performed each year that the medical community has coined the term ‘Failed Back Surgery Syndrome.’ Estimates for needed surgeries are wildly lower than the actual number of surgeries performed every year.

Fortunately, we offer a different ‘next step.’ In the case of sciatica, this would likely be an Epidural Steroid Injection, which brings localized pain relief without the risk of addiction. This action will make it possible for you to use our rehabilitation practices—physical therapy and chiropractic—in order to fix the cause of your pain. Among a number of other interventional procedures, we perform Epidural Steroid Injections right in our Red Bank office.

If you are living with any type of pain, disability, injury, illness, etc., we can help. Contact us and together we’ll discover drug-free, healthy, and effective treatment plans.

For those of you who’ve been waiting to see Dr. Dandrea in the intervening months, we’d like to invite you now to return to our office. For new patients, come discover the difference at Monmouth Pain. Kindly give us a call at 732.345.1377 before coming by.

In Dr. Dandrea’s words:

Since I began Monmouth Pain nearly 15 years ago, I’ve treated literally thousands of patients. If you were any one of them, you know that I was just as enthusiastic to treat the thousandth patient as I was the very first.

When something is your true passion, generating that type of motivation and excitement isn’t difficult. And when you mean what you’re doing, the results are often dramatic.

Last summer, I was involved in an auto accident in Red Bank that has kept me from practicing as a chiropractor in our Red Bank office. An SUV drove over my foot, breaking the lower part of my leg and causing a compression fracture in one of my lumbar (lower back) vertebrae while giving me a significant concussion.

I’m an active person—anyone who is a patient in our office knows that I’m constantly moving, always working to give everything to our practice and to my family. When the accident first happened, I thought I could push through and keeping moving at the same pace. I thought I could keep going as I had before—and I was wrong.

In particular, having a concussion meant that I often felt dizzy and experienced vertigo. Of all of my injuries, these symptoms are what finally brought me to a place where I had to admit that something serious had happened to me, that I had to stop and allow myself to recover. Otherwise, I would be of no use to anyone, including both my family and our patients.

If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that we need to take the time to let our bodies heal after a trauma. If you’re in pain, don’t let mental blocks stop you from getting help. Denial is counterproductive and waiting to seek help only makes things worse.

I took the time I really needed to recover. A major downside was that I was unable to treat patients during this time. I missed the time I spent with our patients, missed that sense of privilege I always feel when a patient invites me to listen to their concerns and trusts me to find solutions for their painful problems.

The good news? My symptoms have dissipated and I’ve been given the green light to return to light duty at Monmouth Pain. While I’ve left my patients in the more-than-capable hands of our team of chiropractors here, I honestly can’t wait to get back on the treatment floor again.

This week, I’m getting that first-day of school feeling again. Even better, I’m not really the same person I was six months ago. An experience like this changes you forever. In this case, the injury was particularly and ironically relevant to my job as the director of rehabilitation at Monmouth Pain.

The foundation of Monmouth Pain’s core values was built on principles rooted in Chiropractic care. What does this mean? It means that today we are a medical pain management center that doesn’t give out pain pills like candy. It means that we’re 100% and enthusiastically committed to correcting what’s causing your pain without inflicting additional damage to the body. We want you to leave our office without pain and in better health than when you first came. This is an important distinction between us and other medical practices.

That seems intuitive, doesn’t it? And yet so much medical care is centered on pain pills and/or traumatic surgeries. Let’s take a thoughtful route to get you where you want to go. Well-planned pain management and rehabilitation is the key to this objective. Your body’s structure is a major influence in how well it will function as well as in its ability to heal.

We want to focus on your body’s ability to heal, rather than relying on surgery to offer a traumatic quick fix. Maybe you’re in too much pain for physical therapy or chiropractic care. Okay, let’s try something different. Epidural Steroid Injections, which are performed right here in our Monmouth County office, have provided plenty of back pain/sciatica/disc injury patients with localized pain relief. Localized pain relief accomplishes two really major goals:

• Allows patients to avoid damaging the body with painkilling medications.
• Helps suffering patients stay away from the operating table by making physical therapy and chiropractic recovery possible.

We offer a number of interventional procedures aside from Epidurals. We also provide Viscosupplementation for knee pain.

The spirit of commitment to providing the very best pain management is how Monmouth Pain initially went from being a one-room chiropractic office to a cutting-edge facility complete with medical doctors, a full physical therapy department, a team of the very best chiropractors in Monmouth County, and acupuncturists.

I’ve been really thrilled to see that so many of my patients have reached out with concern for my condition. It’s also been awesome to see such a large number come in looking for treatment with me.

It’s time to come back and find out what hasn’t changed since the accident—that my hands are still working, that my passion for helping others has grown only stronger, and that I’m looking forward to sitting down with each and every patient and listening to their concerns.

I can’t wait to start seeing both new and returning patients in the upcoming days, weeks, and months. I’m grateful for your patience and hope that we’ll be seeing each other soon.

Feel free to contact us here to set up your appointment.

We tend to think of getting older and/or experiencing a physical trauma as the major causes of back pain—but stress and anxiety can also be the culprits behind this common complaint. Back issues related to stress can also leave you more vulnerable when you do experience an injury from improper lifting, sports injuries, or any other incident. Let’s take a look at how emotional issues can hurt your back and explore the best ways to rehabilitate from back pain and injury.

First, it’s important to point out that generally speaking, stress is bad for your health. It can cause insomnia, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, headaches, digestive issues, irregular cycles for women, and fertility issues. Stress can even be a causative factor for cancer. I think we can agree that while minor, temporary stress has been shown to prompt people to do well at work and on tests, serious, long term stress is terrible for your body and can really disrupt your life.

A lot of people hold their stress in their muscles. In particular, the muscles of the neck and shoulders. This is why many people experience headaches during especially stressful times. Think about how you’re holding your shoulders and your neck right now—do they feel loose and calm or are you tensing them uncomfortably? How relaxed do you feel at this moment?

If you’re stressed out, here’s what’s happening to you: when the muscles tense up due to emotional issues, they may squeeze the blood vessels flowing through them. As the normal flow of blood becomes constricted in this way, and there isn’t proper blood supply, the muscles alert you by sending pain signals.

As time marches on and those muscles fail to receive the oxygen and nutrients they need from the blood, they begin to weaken. In losing crucial supplies of fuel, they become not only weak but also much more vulnerable to injury. For example, weak core muscles cause lower back pain.

Physical Therapy is extremely helpful in such situations. Not only does exercise have the amazing ability to make you feel better emotionally, it can also boost circulation to affected muscles and help rebuild strength. Additionally, physical therapy can help to resolve your back pain condition after damage has been done, thereby helping you to move and function normally again—without pain.

We’ve been using our PowerPlate exercise machine to help boost many of our patients’ exercise routines with vibration. Vibration prompts an automatic and reactionary response that can increase the efficiency of therapeutic exercise exponentially. Because of the success of our initial PowerPlate investment, we’ve recently decided to incorporate more machines in the office, thereby offering even more of our patients the chance to try this technology—technology which was originally developed for Russian cosmonauts’ atrophied muscles.

Chiropractic Treatment is a natural, intuitive solution for many back pain-related issues, such as disc injuries, sciatica, etc. Monmouth Pain and Rehabilitation offers a type of chiropractic that specializes in ensuring the health of the entire spine (as opposed to only concerning itself with individual issues within the spine). When your spine is in its normal, healthy position, the body’s central nervous system is free to work properly. Not only does this reduce pain, but can also help to relieve stress by liberating the body from the general physical disorder associated with an unhealthy central nervous system.

Acupuncture is also helpful, especially since it offers stress relief without drugs. By harmonizing the body’s yin and yang (these are the opposing forces which make up your QI, your life force), acupuncture brings the body back to its natural state of balance. Many patients become so relaxed during acupuncture treatments that they fall asleep and leave our acupuncture rooms looking content and peaceful. It works by prompting the release of a number of feel-good substances in the brain, including pain-fighting endorphins and mood-enhancing serotonin.

Pain and Anxiety Medications: Avoiding Drugs with Epidural Steroid Injections for Back Pain

Whatever happens, we don’t want any patient to think that the long-term use of painkilling or anxiety medications is a good solution. The combination of drugs makes potential physical damage to the body even worse. What we’re talking about here is liver and kidney damage as well as the risk of addiction.

But what if your back pain is severe? What if you’re unable to use physical therapy or chiropractic treatment because you can’t move or you find both prospects too painful to endure?

First, take the time to reduce your stress by cutting back on stimulants such as caffeine or nicotine. Take care of your body with acupuncture, a healthy diet, and good sleep habits.

For back pain, Epidural Steroid Injections provide serious, localized pain relief. These corticosteroid injections may also include an anesthetic for immediate relief while the steroid medication remains to provide your body with much-needed, longer-lasting relief from pain. Many patients find that it is easier to use physical therapy or chiro after an Epidural Steroid Injection—which corresponds with our objective to FIX your back pain issue so you can return to normal movement.

Contact our Red Bank rehabilitation office to learn more about non-surgical options for back pain relief.