@Post 20 and everyone else here with back pain and damage.
You have disk herniation at the minimum. I'm an amateur (as in hobbyist) body builder, and at 23, I rolled a jeep and ruptured or bulged C4,C5 and C6. At this point, I honestly can't remember which ones are bulged and which are ruptured.
I became a pain killer addict for five years, because I liked them. They took away the pain and everything else about he world I didn't like. I ate them like candy, until I couldn't do it anymore. I broke the cycle, but it wasn't easy, and with nine operations, it was really freaking hard.
I will say this: surgery is the only answer in my opinion, when you are losing substantial strength in the extremities. Beyond that, I see no value in the risks that come with it relative to the possible improvements it offers.
For me, the injury wasn't noticeable until I a few days later and I was doing something silly that emulated the jeep roll over, and I felt a "crick" in my neck, but this wasn't like any crick I ever woke up with in my life. My neck was frozen from pain.
I canceled the surgery by paging the doctor nine hours before the procedure (he was ticked) and found a reliable online "pain management doctor." In truth, I needed the pills about 50 percent of the time for the first year, then 25 percent of the time the second year, and then 10 percent the third, and by year four, I didn't need them at all, but I kept taking them and taking them and taking them.
Now I'm clean, after years of work, and I say "clean" because I don't use conventional narcotics anymore. I'm on a subutex, which is an opiate and it will mind alter the non-opiate user into illness, but for a dependent user, it has no mind altering effects and blocks all other opiates from reaching the receptors of the brain. In short, you can't relapse even if you wanted to, because the receptors are full.
The downside is that when you really hurt, tough. The upside is, I'm no longer a slave to narcotics. If I stay active, strong and keep a strong core, my neck rarely bothers me. That said, I still occasionally have a flare up, but instead of nuking it with Norco or something stronger I ice the crap out of it, and rest it for a few days. I take ibuprofen when it's really bad, but ice is my best friend.
I may reach a point where surgery isn't an option, but a necessity. My numbness is increasing as of late, though my pain is nominal, and the numbness is the early sign of a a serious impingement where, if I start losing strength in my extremities, I'm at a cross roads of saving my arm, or avoiding narcotics and surgery.
To make matters worse, I have a ruptured thoracic vertebrae in addition to several lumbar ruptures or bulges. I'm finally getting them imaged, but I know they are there because the pain is so similar. I now realize I did the lumbar in high school football dead lifting. I did the thoracic in some way I can't even understand, but even without imaging, I know with 100 percent certainty that I have at least seven, if not 10 vertebrae with pathology.
I mention that because I'm in a nasty pain cycle in the lumbar region right now, where my legs went out on me on Saturday night. It's the worst one I've ever felt with the second worst being when I was 35 and dead lifting 345 pounds. That time I was tired and using poor form, and mid lift, I buckled. This time, I'm 37, and I was bending to pick up something my girlfriend dropped. No weight – just an odd angle bend at the waste with a little rotation and bam! My legs gave out. I still work out dead-lifting at 225, am in the best shape of my life and and I'll never dead-lift heavy like that again (I thought I was paralyzed), so my back is strong. My core is strong, but I guess age has a way of tearing up your body.
I'm now dying for a narcotic, but I won't do it. I did go to the doctor because the last MRI I had was in 2001 which was when I backed out of surgery. I need to know what state of degradation my spine is in and to find out what I can do to slow the degradation, which I'm sure I can do; I just don't know how yet.
I'll be seeing a physiologist because a neurosurgeon is just going to push the knife on me because that's what they do: push people into surgery they don't usually need. It's not their fault. They believe they are doing the right thing, but the medical community is being irresponsible in this category. There are articles online covering this issue.
I will make one suggestion for managing pain without narcotics and that doesn't involve "adjustments" which is hocus pocus crap, and I don't care if it works for you; that doesn't mean it's not complete nonsense. The only medically certifiable improvement ever made by chiropractor practitioners is lumbar compression reduction. Beyond that, it's all nonsense and what's worse, if you've been adjusted more than five or six times, they have forever damaged the soft connective tissue in your spine, so you will be a client for life.
Anyway, though it's early, lasers have been used for some time to treat people, but up until very recently, it was the same charlatans I mention above. They were using a laser not much stronger than a laser pointer and charging out the wazoo. Now, the Class III laser is but its still very low powered, though it's helpful in pain and inflammation reduction. Class IV lasers are very rare, but if PT's and chiropractors knew how inexpensive they really are, they'd be in every PT and cracktopractor clinic in the states.
I was treated one time in my cervical region during a flare with a 40 watt laser, and my neck was 75 percent better the next day, and 90 percent better the following day where it usually would have taken a week.
If you happen to be interested, I'm super excited about this as I am about e-cigarettes after quitting smoking after 23 years.
