Understanding and Addressing the Root Cause of Back Arthritis: A Comprehensive Guide

In this video, I’m going to talk to you about back arthritis and everything you need to know to understand and fix the root problem. So let’s get into what is back arthritis. A lot of people are confused about this because they hear it mixed up with other diagnoses like disc herniations, pinched nerves in the back for set arthropathy is another confusing one.

And degenerative disc disease is another common term thrown out there. And very often, people have them all at the same time. So let me tell you specifically what back osteoarthritis is and just to take a side note on that osteoarthritis is what I’m talking about. There are different types of arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis. And those are other conditions that are not what this video is about.

I’m talking about back osteoarthritis, but everybody says arthritis. So that’s what I’m saying here. So if we’re talking about back arthritis that we’re discussing, the set joints that are right here, you have pairs of them at every level in the spine. We’re not talking about the discs on the front, although that is technically considered a joint because it’s where two bones meet together.

But it’s not a normal joint discs are not directly related to this video, they are indirectly related, and we’ll talk more about them in just a moment. But right here, where I’m trying to get my nail in between where the bones touch where this bone is, this would be L three. And this bonus would be L for the outside part of this right here is the superior for set of L four.

 And the inside part is the inferior Facet of L three, that’s where the joint is the facetted joint, that’s where arthritis in the back happens. It can happen at any level. And on either side, because you have pairs of these set joints on each side of the spine, wherever the joints connect with a vertebrae come together. Because I’m talking about the set for set is just a fancy word for face.

Because the surfaces of these joints are flat like a face and they come together and they move on each other like this. You can also be told that you have something called a set arthropathy or for set arthritis for set osteoarthritis. And they’re all kind of the same thing.

Back arthritis back osteoarthritis, for set arthritis or osteoarthritis, and for set arthropathy are all virtually the same thing. It just depends on what the radiologist decides to write on your X ray or MRI report, or what’s your doctor tends to use in their verbiage. But you don’t need to get all hung up on Well, I have to set arthropathy and back arthritis. And for set osteoarthritis as well.

They’re all the same thing. Now let me tell you about the root problem, I’m going to tease a little bit here. And then I’ve got a lot more about it towards the end of this video. So make sure you watch to the end. It’s just the way the video fits together. The root problem here is a muscle imbalance where the back muscles and muscles are run up and down the spine here are being overused.

And there’s other muscle groups in the area that it should balance out with to give the proper pressures on the spine. But if you’re overusing your back muscles, and it’s going to overpressure, those set joints back here. And over time, it causes arthritis problems. And this is my perspective on this. And I treat patients from this perspective. And they get tremendously better using this approach.

But what you might hear, especially if you go to the doctor’s office is that this is age related. It’s caused from repetitive use. And to a degree those are true. But there’s also a lot of false information out there about this. And to say this is age related, I think is just misleading because people of all ages get this, it tends to be older people, but it’s not necessarily their age that brought it on. It’s the muscle imbalance over time that brings it on.

So it’s just that it happens over time. It doesn’t happen instantly. Like a back spasm for instance, where you can get an all of a sudden your back starts to hurt, which is also related to time. But then we have people that are older and have recovered from their back arthritis meaning they don’t have any problems related to it, the more they are back to normal doing normal activities.

So to say that it’s age related, I think is inappropriate. If you’re doing the right treatment, you can address the root problem. And even though you’re getting older you can get better. Now let’s talk about the symptoms of back arthritis.

The number one symptom of course is going to be pain in the area of your back right in the lower back above the buttock the gluteal region, not quite your mid back but it is your lower back. Another associated symptom with this is having stiffness in your back especially in the morning when you first wake up to get up out of bed rolling out of bed.

Bending over put on socks and shoes tends to be very difficult. People will complain have lots of stiffness in their back. This tends to improve as you move around in the morning. Sometimes it takes just a few minutes of the times it can take you closer to an hour or more depending on the severity, how severe your lower back arthritis is, in some cases, the back arthritis can hurt not only here, but it can go into the glute area and hurt in the buttock region.

And this is especially uncomfortable and it could mean that you’re getting sciatica type problems, which is related to having back arthritis, so the symptoms can spread. And that’s just because the way the nerves come out of the spine here, these yellow things on my skeleton, they branch out into the legs into the hips, they go down the back, in the buttock area, they go down the front of the groin area, that hip area, all the way down into the knees, and feet even.

So it is possible to get radiating symptoms all the way down, that are really coming from your back arthritis problem up in your lower back. If you have stiffness in the morning, and then it tends to get better. Very often people also say that by the end of the day, their back is just killing them. So it doesn’t stay better all day long, especially more severe cases.

There, they move, they feel better. And then they start to worsen as the day goes on. And they’re just ready to go to bed at the end of the day. And another time that you may get stiffness is not just in the morning when you wake up and get up for the day. But also if you’ve been sitting for a while, let’s say you’ve been watching a TV program or watching a movie or something, you’ve been sitting for an hour or more maybe having a meal and then you get up to move.

Those initial first steps when you get up to move could be very stiff and painful in the lower back and it could send symptoms into the hips and even down the legs. The more extreme cases of back arthritis involve pain at night. Some people just cannot get comfortable, their back is throbbing, aching burning, it’s just painful at night, turning over in bed can be uncomfortable, as well. It’s just rolling over to lay on the side or to get on your back.

It can just be uncomfortable the movement that’s involved in turning over. And in especially severe cases, you may get a rubbing, or a clicking or popping sensation in the back with certain movements, usually with bending forward bending backwards. And with twisting, like if you’re turning around to look over your shoulder that can create some popping clicking or rubbing sensations, grinding sensations in the lower back.

Now if you go to your doctor, you might get sent for imaging, which is X rays, MRIs, CT scans, those kinds of things. Those are the three most common scans or imaging that you’ll get done for back arthritis. And the extra is going to be the top one, the first one that most doctors will go to, you may get an MRI or a CT scan if they want to see if there’s any nerve involvement if there’s pinching of your nerves on the sides of your spine, if they want to look at the discs as well.

But an x ray typically shows really well the arthritis that could be in those facetted joints of your lower back. And let’s talk about treatment. For back arthritis. The first step that people usually go through as they go see their physician, maybe their general doctor, and the doctor will probably recommend medications to start off pain medications, oral pain medication, so we’ll be taking something by mouth.

Sometimes we’ll also prescribe what’s called the Z Pak or a steroid, which you take by mouth. And the idea with that is to bring down the inflammation because the very definition of back osteo arthritis or osteoarthritis just generally osteo means bone.

Arth means joint. An itis means inflammation. So it means bone joint inflammation. If we talk about arthropathy, like the set joint arthropathy, which I said is kind of the same thing as back arthritis. For set joint is just talking about the specific type of joint that’s in the spine here. Our Earth means joint and then apathy means disease.

So for set joint disease, and then you can also have for set joint osteoarthritis, which is just the bone joint inflammation of the first set. So that’s just a medical terminology lesson for the day related to back arthritis. The reason why you would get that that Z Pak or that steroid medication is to bring down the inflammation, the joint and to get you some relief, but it’s just temporary relief. And same thing if they give you pain medications, it’s also just temporary relief.

Going back to that root problem. Medications don’t fix a muscle imbalance it’ll make muscles stronger weekers to provide the proper balance and movement around the joints. If oral medications aren’t helping you enough, they might recommend as a next step and injection to your spine. And they can actually target the specific joints, the facetted joint in your spine to see if you can get relief in that area. For many people.

This does provide some temporary relief people can often even say they feel great they don’t feel any pain whatsoever, especially if they target the right joint. This technique is also used as a diagnostic tool to figure out If something called radiofrequency ablation might help, radiofrequency ablation or RFA for short, is basically where they burn the nerves that innervate that send sensation to the specific preset join.

And I highly don’t recommend that for many reasons, I’ve actually made other videos about this, and that you don’t want to get rid of frequency ablation if as long as you treat the root problem, and it’s getting better, you should stick with that because burning your nerves in the long term is not a good thing.

But they’ll do the injection, usually a cortisone injection where they inject steroids to reduce the inflammation and pain to test if it’s truly coming from the preset joint. And if they find that it is relieving the pain, once you do the cortisone injection, then doctors can say, well, if we do the RFA, the radiofrequency ablation, because we had success with the injection, we can get some longer term or short term relief, I say longer term short term relief because it’s still not addressing the root problem.

It’s still addressing the short term problem, which is just getting relief to the area. But we don’t ask the question, doctors aren’t asking the question, what’s causing the problem in the air, they’re just saying, let’s kill the nerves in the area not good.

And if you’re not a candidate for radiofrequency ablation, or they’re just it’s not something that doctors thinking about at this time, then they might send you for a surgical consultation, and a surgical referral going to the surgeon’s office, they’re going to of course, take X rays, MRIs or look at your past ones and assess or see if you’re a good candidate for a surgery.

The surgeries that they might offer you would be a facettes ostomy, which means they’re cleaning up around the the joint here because very often when there’s arthritis in the area, you can get bone spurs, which is thickening of bone around the area, which could impede movements or impinge on nerves.

Sometimes too, there’s a disc herniation related to this, and the doctor, the surgeon is looking at doing a diskectomy where they cut out a section of the disc in order to provide relief to the pinched nerve in the area. These surgeries are very commonly done and in my opinion, highly unnecessary many, many times, it’s just that it’s hard to treat the root problem because not many people out there are talking about the root problem like we do at length on this channel.

Another recommendation your doctor might make is to go to physical therapy, where you might do some exercises, and hands on work to treat your back arthritis. Now I have to caution you about physical therapy clinics just because as a physical therapist, myself, I’ve been in these clinics where people get go to get treatment and go to get exercise.

And what I can tell you from firsthand experience is that physical therapists are excellent at helping people who have just had surgery. Meaning if you just had a disc surgery, a fusion surgery where they put rods and screws in your back.

If you’ve had a hip surgery, like a replacement and knee surgery, shoulder surgery, physical therapists and most outpatient physical therapy clinics are fantastic at getting those people back to moving back to life as normal again, what they’re not usually best at is treating non surgical cases.

If you have back arthritis, and you’re looking to avoid having a back surgery, than going to any general outpatient physical therapy clinic is not a good idea without doing some research beforehand, you should look to find a physical therapist who is a specialist in helping people avoid surgery.

And not all physical therapy clinics are going to know to tell you this, or they don’t say this when you call them on the phone. Or if you look at their website, they don’t always have this on there.

There’s more now than ever, but it’s still not anywhere near a common sight to find a specialist physical therapist that helps you avoid surgery, the way you can tell that you’re in a clinic that might make you worse, because they’re not specialists in the right way is by what they have you do and by who you see there if you just talk to the other patients that are there.

And there’s a bunch of people that have had surgery while you’re in a clinic that specializes in helping people after surgery, but also the types of exercises that you’re doing for your back arthritis problem.

You don’t want to be doing back extension exercises, meaning they look like this you lie on your stomach and you’re lifting up your spine like this, or they’re standing versions as well, where you’re standing like this and you’re bending backwards and the emphasis is on strengthening these muscles in the lower back.

That is the wrong thing to do on so many levels. And it goes back to that root imbalance that I’ve told you where the back muscles are already very strong and used. They’re being overused and they’re compressing those percent joints leading to arthritis. And it’s different if you’ve just had a surgery because those muscles might be weak because they would have cut into your back and you might need to get those back muscles working against those exercises that I just showed, you, could be a very appropriate thing for you to do.

But if the therapist you’re seeing is used to helping people who have just had surgery, they may not know to tell you that they’re not a specialist. And they may have you doing the same exercises that they have their other patients do that have had surgery. And it could make your case worse in the long run, the type of treatment that you should be looking for is hands on treatment, where they’re looking at freeing up the joints in your spine.

Now I’ve got specialist treatment, I’m actually a manual physical therapist. And so that’s what I do with all my clients here, we hardly ever see surgical cases, and I am a targeting in on each facetted joint to check the mobility of each one to make sure they’re all moving freely. Now chiropractors do similar treatment, they can free up the joints, of course, they’re into joint adjustments or popping joints in your spine. So just proceed carefully with them.

Where it’s different with chiropractors as they may not be able to give you the right exercises to address the root problem, because freeing up the joints in your spine, although is necessary for back arthritis problems, it needs to be paired with the right exercises, to fix the imbalance to make sure that you’re taking pressures off the back joints for the long term.

Now let’s talk about the root problem a little bit more. I mentioned already, the back muscles here are over dominance. But what needs to be worked on here? Well, there’s three muscle groups that provide motion and stability to the lower back here, the back muscles I’ve already mentioned are one, the abdominal muscles are run around the front, your abs, they have some tendons that connect to the spine directly and of course, to the pelvis bones here.

And the movement in the pelvis greatly influences the pressures that go through the spine. And then there’s one more group the hip flexors, which start down here in the thigh bones and they run up into the spine, one muscle in particular directly influences a spine, it’s called the so as major muscle, you need to have balance between these three muscle groups in order to have the right pressures on your spine.

So that you can reduce the symptoms of back arthritis, this root problem that I’m telling you affects many other back issues. And this is why if you go get an MRI, or a CT scan, the doctor might tell you that in addition to your back arthritis, you also have a disc herniation and a pensioner and degenerative disc disease and loss of disc height, they might ramble on with a bunch of scary sounding diagnoses for your back.

And you know, back arthritis maybe being the leading one or the one that they hang on the most. But the root problem for all of those conditions that I mentioned, is this imbalance that I’m telling you about. And that root problem needs to be addressed in order for you to have the best long term relief so that you can get back to normal as best as possible.

And even if you decide, or maybe you’ve already had a surgery for your back, you’ve had a diskectomy, maybe you’ve had rods and screws into your spine, you’ve had a fusion surgery, or facettes ostomy, you’ve had some sort of back surgery to help with a back problem, that does not solve the long term problem.

Because if you never had that underlying root problem addressed, then it’s probably still there, you’re probably still moving in a way that’s feeding into the problem, the root problem, and you might be exercising into the root problem as well unknowingly. And if you don’t address that root problem, it’s just a matter of time, before you start to affect another area of the spine, another facet joint or another disc on the front, maybe your back is fused, and you don’t have any more movement in that area.

But right above or right below that joint, you’re starting to get the next problem. We see this all the time. And we hear about patients that have multiple fusion surgeries or multiple diskectomy surgeries. And it’s because that root problem was never addressed. People just go to surgery thinking that that’s going to address the long term problem. But it truly is not a long term fix.

It’s just a permanent short term fix. And we see surgeons sometimes as the end all be all, but that root problem needs to be addressed. And I’ve got a program that fixes the root problem of all these lower back problems, especially for back arthritis. It’s called the 28 day back health and wellness boost program.

There’s a link to it in the description below in case you want to learn more about it. It’s got a series of exercises that you do over a course of 28 days and measure your improvement and it is focused on addressing that root muscle imbalance so that you can take pressures off your facetted joints on your back.

It takes it normalizes the pressures on your discs and takes pressures off the nerves as well. And we’ve got other playlists to address things like lumbar stenosis and disc degeneration and degenerative disc disease. They’re all linked in the description below. Hope this video was helpful for you. If you’ve got any questions, drop them in the comments below. If you want to support art channel with a super thanks we’d really love that we’d appreciate that super thanks is the little heart icon with $ sign in it it’s in the same row as the like button just scroll down a bit you’ll see that and I’ll see you guys in the next video thanks so much bye