Chronic Back Pain Can Shrink Your Brain: Here’s How Chiropractic Care May Help
Your frequent lower back ache may be limiting your quality of life. It also puts you at risk for other health issues, as it reduces your immune system’s efficiency and impedes normal healing processes. In addition, it may also be causing your brain to shrink.
That’s right. Back pain can literally cause relative brainlessness. By extension, you could also say it causes light-headedness.
Pain Withers Your Brain
A study published in The Journal of Neuroscience showed that brain atrophy may be related to chronic lower back pain. The study compared the relative brain size of individuals with chronic back pain to that of a control group, and found that those with the back pain had between five and 11 percent less gray matter than those who did not have pain. Given that the brain normally deteriorates at about half a percent per year, chronic back pain can cause roughly 10 to 20 years of neural aging.
While this may make your head physically lighter and easier to carry around, it also limits your brain function. Obviously, this is not a desirable effect, so the question becomes how one might treat the pain causing this brain atrophy. The answer is quite simple: go and see a chiropractor.
Chronic Pain Treatment and More
Another study published in the journal Spine, compared the effects of chiropractic care, medication, and acupuncture on chronic back pain. Both chiropractic treatment and acupuncture were more effective than medication, with chiropractic adjustment being five times more effective than Tylenol, Vioxx, or Celebrex. Chiropractic was also three times more effective than acupuncture. In addition, chiropractic care had no adverse side effects on patients, while medication did.
But that isn’t all. A year later, a follow up study showed that the results of chiropractic care are long-lasting, while acupuncture and medication are not. Both those who took medication and those who had acupuncture ended up back where they started, as if no treatment had taken place at all. Meanwhile, those who had their backs adjusted were as healthy and pain-free as ever, with additional benefits to their immune system and overall health.
When trying to reduce brainlessness caused by back pain, chiropractic treatment is more effective than most other methods, and is also the most non invasive approach. Not only does it reduce pain, but it does so for the long term, which keeps your brain free of the atrophying effects of the pain. In addition, it also improves your immune system efficiency and reduces your risk of future health complications.