9 Natural Remedies For Lower Back Pain

Are you suffering from lower back pain, and you’re looking for some sort of home remedies? Something that you can do at home that’s natural, that doesn’t involve pain medications, injections, or seeing the doctor, and possibly getting referred for a surgery? If you think that you can try something at home, then here’s an expert list that you can go through and see if you can get some relief right now for your lower back pain problem.

My name is Dr. David Middaugh. I’m a specialist physical therapist over in El Paso Manual Physical Therapy. And I’ve been helping people with back pain problems for years and years now, and we’re pretty darn good at it.

Now these tips that I’m about to give you are just a way to calm down the problems so that you can get a decent night’s rest, or maybe not take that medicine, that you’re looking at taking because you’re afraid that it’s going to upset your stomach or cause some more serious health issues if you keep using it. Or in some of the prescription strength medications, of course you’re concerned about addiction problems or some nasty side effect.

You can use these tips to avoid those situations. And of course, hopefully you can progress your back problems so that it’s completely gone and avoid having to take more prescription strength medications or getting an injection or of course, avoiding an unnecessary surgery because you found a natural way to fix it. So, let’s get into it.

Number one, ice and heat

Ice and heat are so commonly thrown out there but the way to do it and how to approach it, not everybody explains pretty well. So let me get into that for you. Some people prefer ice and some people prefer heat. If you’ve never tried either, I recommend starting with ice first. Get a cold pack, you can buy them at the store like a Walmart grocery stores often have them as well. Usually they have some gel fluid inside, you stick in the freezer, and you want to put that on your back.

Oftentimes they’re very moldable and that works so that you can contour it to your back you can lay down on it or sit with it on in a chair or couch. And if you don’t want to do that you just go get some ice tubes in a bag and put in a Ziploc bag or something, wrap a towel around it so that it’s not so cold against your skin, or put it over your clothing so that it’s not directly on your skin. And that works pretty well too.

What you want to do is have it on for about 15 to 20 minutes, really, you’re looking for your skin to get numb. Just when it starts to get numb, that’s when you’ve had the ice on long enough, take it off for about 15 to 20 minutes, and then repeat that three or four times. Or you put it on for 15 or 20 minutes and take it off and then cycle through that three or four times. And usually doing that, it can reduce the pain, not necessarily take it away, but it can reduce it so that you can get some relief and not feel like you have to take pain medications.

Now if that isn’t working for you, try that once or twice, and if it just didn’t really make a difference, then try heat. And similar things, they have hot packs you can buy at the store. There are hot water bottles, rubber things that you fill up with boiling water, and they’re pretty good as well, where you can make hot packs at home. I’ve seen people put rice into socks, and then you just tie a knot and stick in the microwave for a couple of minutes and the rice holds heat really well.

There are all kinds of options out there. If you just Google hot packs or go to the grocery store and ask about it, well, you put that on your back. And same thing, you can put that on for about 15 to 20 minutes, just got to be careful that it’s not so hot that it’s going to burn your skin because that can literally happen you can actually get burns on your skin. So be wise about it. And don’t get your skin burned, that you can typically leave on for a little bit longer. So you can go maybe up to 30 minutes.

Oftentimes people get relief that way if they’re not responding to the cold very well. And then there are some people out there that don’t respond to either. So if you’ve tried ice and then you’ve tried heat and you thought it didn’t make a difference, that’s actually normal. Some people out there just don’t respond to ice or heat. That’s me.

It is also related to body part, sometimes more superficial joints like knees and elbows and hands will allow the ice or the heat to penetrate better, versus the low backs covered in more tissue, more muscle and other tissues. So it may not penetrate as good. And that could also be a factor in the ice or heat not working in case you don’t get the relief that you’re hoping.

Tip number two extra pillows at night

If you’ve got trouble sleeping at night, because of this lower back pain problem that you’re dealing with, then go get extra pillows. Dig some up in your house, maybe you got throw pillows around in your living room or go to the store and purchase a pillow. Even if it’s a cheap pillow that cost you $10 or less and when you go to lie down, try lying on the side and put that pillow between your knees. Usually that separates your hips enough to get some tension to the muscles off of your lower back.

And then another option is when you’re lying on your back, if that’s how you prefer to sleep or you find that that’s a little more comfortable for your back, slipped that same pillow under your knees so that it’s slightly bends your knees up. Legs are completely straight, but they’re slightly bent.

You might even try shoving a few pillows under there, two or three or more to almost pick up your legs a bit. And that can take some tension off the lower back so that you can sleep more comfortably.

What we hear a lot of times people take pain medication to go to sleep because they’re not getting good sleep and they’re waking up miserable in the morning and they’re just not themselves and don’t treat people too nice. We want to have you avoid that situation so that you can have great relationships and have a fun time the next day when you wake up after sleeping with the back pain problem. So, try those pillow situations out and I think you’ll find that that helps out tremendously.

The third tip here, and natural home remedy is chair support.

A lot of people don’t really consider the type of chair that they’re using. Whether it’s a kitchen chair at home that they frequently sit in, their couch, the recliner, or if you’ve got a desk job and you’ve got a computer chair at work, consider the back support that you’ve got.

Ideally if you’ve got a back problem, there’s other things you need to be doing. This isn’t the only solution, you can have to use a combination of all these tips to find the best approach to ease the back pain problem. But consider the backrest that you’ve got, you want something with a little bit of cushion on it, and something that feels supportive when you go to lay back on it.

Now the way to properly use a backrest, a lot of people don’t think about this, you’ve got to slide your butt all the way back into the seat where the seat part the bottom part of the seat meets the backrest. That corner, your bottom needs to be in that corner and then recline back. If your bottom isn’t in that corner and there’s a gap, usually people will kind of slouch a bit and the bottom slides forward, it puts a not good pressure on your lower back and can begin to affect the back gradually over time it can feed into a back problem.

So you want to make sure that you slide your bottom all the way to the back of the seat and then lean on the backrest and ideally get some sort of cushion on there. We’ve had clients that are working from home a lot and they may be at the kitchen table. And so they’re using kitchen table chairs that don’t have good support. And if you’ve got, say a wooden chair, a metal chair, something that’s just not going to hold, it doesn’t have a whole lot of padding. Go find a throw pillow at home or you can also go to the store and find pads that can attach to chairs like that, or just cushions.

We see some clients find his donut cushions, which are not necessary for a back pain problem. That’s more for a tailbone problem if you’ve got pain in the tailbone. When you sit and when you put pressure on that spot, if it hurts, then the donut might be a good idea. But if you’ve got a lower back pain problem, doughnuts aren’t a good thing to sit on because you don’t need that gap in the middle. You need the cushion against the back and on the bottom as well would be nice. So try that out at home with the with the way that you’re sitting in chairs.

Tip number four, knees to chest exercise

This is a great go-to exercise to just get some temporary relief, to get some pressure taken off your back. And there’s a couple different ways to do this. The easiest way is to go to your bed or go find somewhere that you can comfortably lie down. Ideally like a couch, some someplace that has some cushion. The flor be a little tough, but you could try out if you feel comfortable doing that and allowing your back and then just bring your knees up to your chest and hug your knees with your hands and with your hands, pull your knees towards your chest.

In most back pain problems, this is relieving. And it can feel pretty good, it can feel like a gentle stretch to the back. And usually it takes off some of the pressure, which can produce some pain. And I would hang out there for several minutes, three, four or five minutes, up to 10 minutes after about that you might get diminishing returns.

If lying in your back is uncomfortable because of your specific back problem, you could do this on your side. So pick a side that’s comfortable for you, left or right, and then just slide your knees up towards your chest. And same thing, hug your knees and pull them into your chest and get that pressure off your back. And just hanging out there for a while I’m talking five to 10 minutes literally. And you can kind of play with how much pressure you pull with your, with your hands against your chest, your knees towards your chest, you can let off the pressure and kind of hold it for a little while 10, 20, 30 seconds and then let off.

That tends to ease the back pain problem down. Typically there’s a lot of pressures going through the spine to the discs and the joints and all that and so lying down and doing this knees to chest motion, takes the pressure off, and it can be relieving.

Tip number five hanging from a pull up bars

Now, this is my preference to using an inversion table. We get asked about inversion tables all the time because you see them at the stores, and they’re interesting, you know, hanging upside down and the concept kind of makes sense and it actually is beneficial in inversion table and inversion table.

In case you don’t know is this device where you step into it, it’s got a backrest on it and you hook your ankles into it, it kind of holds on to your ankles, and then it teeter totters over so that your feet come up and your head goes down, and you’re hanging upside down. And the idea is that you’re taking pressure off your spine, which is kind of what I was explaining with that knees to chest exercise.

But the problem with the inversion table is twofold. You’re not really using muscles a whole lot, which is a big deal with getting the best relief for a lower back pain problem. And then the other problem with this is that you’re upside down and all that blood rushes to your head. If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find that it’s kind of uncomfortable, and you really have to build up your tolerance and even if you build up your tolerance, you can’t really last too long down there upside down.

Getting out of those machines can be a little bit challenging sometimes as well. So there’s a little bit of a danger factor for some people. If you are about using inversion tables. That’s cool. And if it works for you, great. I’m not saying don’t do it, do what works for you. Especially if it’s getting off of medications, avoiding injections and avoiding unnecessary surgery. But my recommendation is getting a bar to hang from.

They sell these at sporting goods stores all the time the pull up bars that you can install into a doorway, with an open door, you kind of put it on the top of the doorway. And it is using the way that it’s designed to just kind of hooks onto the doorway, you don’t have to usually install anything, there are some that we will drill into the ceiling or the walls and get it fixated on there. But there are some that you can just hook into place and they don’t require any drilling or any damage to your walls.

What you would do is hang from that pull up bar, but with your feet touching the ground or a stepstool, somewhere where your feet can touch so you’re not completely hanging. If you’ve got the strength to hang, and your doorway is strong enough to support you. I mean, you got to consider your weights on the wall and all that stuff so that you’re not having enough accident because you fell off the pole bar, where you ripped a hole in your wall, you rip the top end of the door down, then you can hang, you can hang all the way.

But while you’re hanging there with your feet touching or not, what you should do is suck in your abs, tighten up those abs. And this is really good work for you, even if you’re not there real long, because think about it. When you suck in those abs like you’re tightening up your abs and you kind of flatten out your back, flatten the arch in your back, you’re taking tons of pressure off.

Then with your feet dangling. Even if your toes are touching a bit, you’re taking a lot of the weight off your lower back, and then you are reaching up and holding on to that bar, stretches out some of the muscles that attach all the way down into the back. There’s a muscle called the latissimus dorsi that starts in the lower back and then it wraps up around the rib cage and goes into the shoulders. The lats muscle is how it’s more commonly known that that muscle can contribute to lower back pain problems.

So stretching it out in that manner and then firing If the abs is a much more strategic way to take pressure off the lower back, because you can involve some exercise that you can’t quite do on an inversion table. So try that out at home.

Tip number six, keep moving.

A lot of people take the approach of “well, I’m going to rest it, I’m going to take it easy”, and what they end up doing is completely stopping exercises completely stopping their household chores. You know, hold putting things off until later doing the absolute minimum movement necessary to rest their back and it kind of works they’ll flare down, which is good because they’re not taking pain medications and all that.

But where it can be possibly detrimental is that their muscles are getting weaker and weaker, because they’ve taken so much time off from moving. You need those muscles, certain muscles to combat a lower back pain problem. So it’s a big deal that you keep some activity in those muscles so that you don’t lose too much muscle.

You’d be surprised after just a couple days of minimal movement, muscles start to waste away, or atrophy as we call it in the medical world. Now, what you should think about when you’re going into trying to move with a back pain problem because it might hurt to move, it might hurt to be standing up and moving around my her team and just be sitting around, do what you can tolerate, do what feels okay on your back.

Think about the lining up your chores, finding ways to walk around and having a place to sit if your back hurts the font modify what you’re doing, but I would keep moving. Because oftentimes that movement that you pursue that isn’t really aggravating on your back problem. You might actually free up the joints that are stuck if that’s part of your problem, or get moving in the areas that aren’t moving so that your back pain problem can improve.

It’s highly beneficial that you keep moving, if  you stay still your waste away those muscles, but also you have a higher propensity for those joints that are that are potentially stuck or those other tissues around your back muscles and tendons that are not moving too good to get even more stuck and you want to avoid that situation.

Tip number seven strength training

Strength training is hugely important for solving back problems. Here in the clinic, whenever we have people with back problems, 99% of the time we’re moving into some sort of strength training program as we wrap up the program, as we wrap up their treatment plan. And the reason why we do it is because it is usually fixing the root problem of the back pain that they’re dealing with.

They’ve typically got a muscle imbalance, people that have back pain problems. And here in the clinic we identify which muscles are out of balances or weaker which ones are too strong and how they’re affecting the spine, the lower back and we haven’t doing specific strengthening exercises, correcting their form curriculum technique, making sure they’re doing the right amounts right volumes of exercise and not doing too much to aggravate an issue.

So if you have found that certain exercises are okay for you to do, while you’ve got your back pain problem, chances are that that’s going to be a good thing for you. Now if you go do a strength training exercise that is aggravating your problem, and now and back off and rethink the situation, try something different or maybe find somebody who knows a little bit more about how to work this out so that you can find the right strengthening exercise to work on the root problem for your lower back pain issue.

Tip Number eight, massage

Especially a specialist massage. I talked about this being home remedies and you can get a family member or spouse or somebody to give you a massage and your lower back and other tight areas of your body places that are stiff because that’s the point of a massage is to free up stiffness. This can be hugely beneficial and getting you some relief so that you can sleep for the night or you can get a few days where you feel a little bit better.

Going to masseuse that you like a place that you’ve been to before if you’re into massages in letting them know where you’re stiff and tight, that can make a huge difference in your back pain problem. But if you can find a massage therapist that has handled back pain problems before and knows how to free up stiff muscles and stiff joints, that’s probably going to be an ideal for you.

It may even take going a couple times a week or a few times a week or going consistently weekly for a while to make sure that you loosen up those muscles and joints enough to get the relief that you’re looking for and keep this back pain problem from getting worse. Then do some research if you’re looking for massage therapist. You might find the right person at a chain massage place but you it might be hit and miss you generally want to find the person that is recommended the person that is confident the massage therapist is confident handling a back pain problem.

You don’t want to just go willy nilly somewhere you want to do a little bit of research Find out if they have helped people with back pain problems before so that you know that your time and money is well spent when going to see that person.

Now keep in mind that a massage alone is not going to solve the whole problem. It’s usually just a piece in the process of resolving a lower back pain problem that’s chronic and coming back over and over again or that’s stopping your tracks. I wouldn’t go into the massage thinking this is going to fix it and after I get this massage or a few massages, I’ll be done with this back problem.

It’s usually a combination of that massage plus other things that you have to do other things that I mentioned on this list are a good place to start that are excellent plan so that you can fix this lower back pain problem for good.

Tip number nine, expert physical therapy.

I think that honestly this is probably the first place you should start especially this has been a recurring problem for you and it’s just getting worse each time it comes on. We see that all the time with clients will come in and say, “You know what, I’ve had back pain off and on for a year or more now. And usually I can do this little exercise or use this lotion that helps out or get a massage”, or they will tell us things that have worked for them in the past. And they’ll get over it within a day or two or a week at most. But now they that stuff isn’t working, and they’ve had the problem bothering them for weeks.

Now they’re losing sleep, they’re unable to enjoy normal things in their life. And they might even be changing in their mood because they’re a little more grumpy because they’re not sleeping enough and in pain. So if, if you’re having that kind of situation where it’s a recurring problem, chances are you’re now on the path to developing some sort of arthritis problem, some sort of disc issue, some pinched nerve situation, sciatica might be developing already where you’re getting pain going down into the leg or even as far down into the foot.

If that problem isn’t addressed early on, it can definitely progress into a situation where you might end up visiting the doctor having to get an MRI or having to possibly talk to a surgeon and consider the possibility of having a surgery to fix your problem.

Either way, whether you’re about to have surgery or you’re just concerned about preventing that, but your back problems not really going away either talking to a specialist and expert physical therapist is going to be of huge benefit for you because as a specialist, physical therapist myself. We offer natural ways to fix a back pain problem, we will use a combination of different approaches to make sure that this back pain problem is on track in getting better so that you’re reducing pain medications, reducing the likelihood of visiting the doctor for injections, and definitely staying away from the surgeon’s knife so that you can have a natural healthy back the rest of your life and enjoy the things that you love.

An expert physical therapist will speed you through this process and give you more certainty that you’ll get the outcome that you’re looking for being able to live your life without this back pain problem.

Well, I hope that this video was helpful for you. If you’re thinking that your back pain problem is a little more chronic or severe than you initially thought, or you’ve tried some of these things and it just isn’t quite working out for you, or you just want to go through this faster and get it done so you’re not having to worry about slowing down with the back pain problem.

Well then consider hiring us, or at least start talking to us about the possibility of hiring us to help you with your back pain problem. The first step in doing that is to go up here above at our website, go to the menu bar at the top and find the option that says cost and availability click on that you’ll get taken to a forum where you leave your details about you and your back pain problem.

Once you leave that, then one of my staff will give you a call back assassin he can. And they want to hear all about your back pain problem to make sure that it’s a type that we can help out here in the clinic. Because if it’s not, we want to make sure to send you the right person and not waste your time.

If it is one that we can help here in the clinic, then we’ll tell you the next steps after that you can always call our clinic as well at 915-503-1314 and just begin telling us about your back pain problem from there too.

I hope that we can be a part of your success story real soon Have a wonderful day.