Chronic back pain is defined as back pain that is persisted for more than three months. As mentioned before, all chronic back pain starts as acute back pain. But now we're talking about later stages and what you should be what you should be driving yourself to do. Now, if you suffer from chronic back pain, you should have already been treated with physiotherapy and some type of exercise therapy. This doesn't mean that the treatment was a failure, and you should continue doing this exercise therapy anyway, even if you continue to suffer from back pain. Of course, don't do any exercises that exacerbate the pain.

You should be doing exercises that help relieve the pain and strengthen your core muscles. If you've been suffering from back pain for more than three months, you also should have gotten some type of imaging done whether that be an X ray, a CT or an MRI without going too much into the imaging If you have a back pain that suggests some type of nerve deficit, like scatter, as we mentioned in a previous video, or a loss of loss of some of the feeling or sensation of your legs, or weakness, tingling that runs down your legs, and of course, bowel or bladder dysfunction, you need to get an MRI to see where that pressure is. And together with your physician or orthopedic surgeon, you can provide a plan or an a treatment plan for you and to see how you will deal with that. If all of the imaging tests that you got were normal, and you didn't see any pathology, then you should be looking elsewhere for the source of that pain.

This includes the visceral organs like the kidney, the digestive tract, and it also includes stress, emotional stress that you have in your life that might be causing this pain. At this point in time, it's very important to mention that completely curing chronic back pain, which you have encountered reason for is very, very tough. More important than completely During the pain, you should be trying working with your physician to devise a plan and create goals for yourself realistic expectations that you can meet goals that you can aspire to, and achieve in order to feel better and manage this pain and living with it and dealing with it in your daily life. Treatment of your back pain should always include a physical plan, including exercise therapy, position therapy, and maybe surgery if that's what you decided. However, it should also include the emotional therapy, psychological therapy, digging and finding what kind of stress or what kind of cognitive distractions may be contributing, not necessarily the only source, but maybe contributing to this back pain.

Setting your expectations making them realistic. And setting your goals is one of the most important part of whether people actually improve or not. People who have realistic expectations are much more likely to Improve and be happy with the results than those who don't have realistic expectations. This brings us to the end of the video about chronic back pain. Remember, you should always be continuing to strengthen your core muscles and continue doing exercise therapy. It will help in the long term.

Don't be discouraged even though it may be tough to deal with. If you continue and push through it will get better. In the next video, we're going to talk a bit about the different medications that can be used to treat chronic back pain.