Manual Therapy Teens with Back Pain
teens with back pain
Back Pain is a well-known source of discomfort in adults, but it is also being diagnosed more frequently in children and adolescents. Most parents don’t expect otherwise healthy children to complain of back pain—a problem generally associated with middle age or later. However, they found back pain to occur in between 14% and 24% of children and adolescents.
Causes of Teens with Back Pain
Muscular Back Pain
It is by far the most common cause of Teens with Back Pain. Injuries include muscle strains and ligament strains, three overuse injuries, problems with posture, and poor conditioning of the muscles of the back.
Stress Fractures
Stress fractures can occur in the spine. Most often, these stress fractures occur in adolescents, and these adolescents may never know an injury has occurred. Over time, signs of the stress fracture may show up.
Disc Problems
Disc herniations are much less common in children than adults, but they can occur, and they can cause severe symptoms. When a disc herniation of the spine occurs, the soft cushion between two vertebrae is ruptured. This disc material is forced out of its regular space and can push against the nerves and spinal cord.
Infection
Infections of the spinal bone or discs can be a challenging diagnosis to make. Often occurring in young toddlers or adolescents, spinal infections may cause vague symptoms of malaise, low-grade fevers, and generalized back pain. This may cause Teens with Back Pain.
Day-to-day Activities
Children who attend school are at risk of developing Teens with Back Pain due to strenuous tasks associated. School bags and long periods sitting in class can be factors that contribute to back pain in young people. Poor posture, overfilled, or non-proportioned backpacks are aspects of investigating if your child is experiencing neck, back, or shoulder pains.
Alignment Abnormalities
Problems with the alignment of the spine can cause a visible deformity and may be associated with the occurrence of Teens with Back Pain. However, more subtle deformities, while noticeable, seldom hurts. The two most common spinal deformities in children are scoliosis and Scheuermann’s kyphosis. Scoliosis is a deformity that causes an S-shaped curve to the spine when seen from the back. Scheuermann’s kyphosis causes a sharp bend in the spine when viewed from the side.
Tumor
Several different benign and malignant bone tumors can occur in the spinal column. Sometimes these cause significant pain; other times, they exist without causing symptoms. While spinal tumors are a very unusual cause of back pain in children and adolescents, they should consider to diagnose it as a possible, albeit rare.
Teens with Back Pain: Warning Signs to Know
Some of the concerns of Teens with Back Pain include knowing when the problem might be more severe than a common strain and knowing when specialized imaging tests might be helpful. That said, there are warning signs to look for to help understand when a back pain problem may be more severe in a younger person.
Every parent whose child is complaining of back pain worries that a more severe problem may be occurring. While there are undoubtedly critical causes of back pain, the vast majority of kids with back pain have symptoms that result from muscle or ligament injury, without any structural abnormality.
Some of the teens with Back Pain warning signs to look out for more serious problems include:
- Night pain (especially pain that awakens your child from sleep)
- Constant symptoms of pain
- Symptoms of generalized illness (fever, chills, malaise, weight loss)
- The symptoms persisting beyond several weeks
- Present symptoms in very young children
- Leg pain, numbness, or weakness
These warning signs don’t necessarily mean there is a more severe problem. However, they are a good screening test to determine if more evaluation is needed. For example, muscular back pain can persist for months. However, if the symptoms have been going on for several weeks, it’s best to ensure the diagnosis is precise.
Teens with Back Pain: How Can Your Teen Benefit from Chiropractic Care
In case you decide to visit a sports therapist, which is advisable, the expert is likely to recommend exercises and chiropractic care. Most of them will insist on combining the two. One meta-analysis supports this argument well. According to it, there’s a massive improvement in pain relief and body flexibility in teens following the use of chiropractic care and exercises. Chiropractic care played a huge role in the study.
All-Round Pain Management
Chiropractic adjustments do not just target Teens with Back Pain. All parts of the body have a connection to the spine. Thus, they can all be relieved from pain by chiropractic adjustments. Whether it’s headache, neck ache, hip pain, or earache, chiropractic adjustments can treat them. The bonus is that the treatment is natural. Therefore, your teen doesn’t have to worry about adverse reactions, as it’s mostly the case with pain medications. Chiropractic care is not just a pain reliever but may also prevent it.
To prevent Teens with Back Pain associated with school bags and posture, ensure your child has a good quality school bag. Quality school bags should come with adjustable straps and waist clips to weight close to the back. School bags should be sized in proportion to your child’s height and weighs less than 10% of their body weight. Teach your child always to carry their bag on both shoulders and adjust straps to ensure it sits close to their back.
In Teens with Back Pain, posture can be improved by guidance to sit and stand up straight without slouching. Regularly stretching after sitting for long periods also helps.
Better Posture
A lot of times, poor posture is associated with prolonged sitting. Teens with Back Pain who like watching too much TV and those who play video games for long are the culprits. Such teens could use chiropractic care. It helps to identify underlying issues on their spine to correct them. If there are misalignments along the spine path that may be messing up your teenager’s posture, a chiropractor will fix them. Furthermore, a chiropractor will advise your teenager on ways to improve body posture at home.
Growth Booster
During teenage life, body growth is at its peak. It is the time that children grow tall and broader. However, this does not apply to all teenagers. For some, some parts of the body grow faster than others, and this makes them look awkward. For others, it appears like they are not growing at all. All these issues, luckily, can be fixed by routine chiropractic visits. It plays a critical role in helping them attain optimal growth and is a good treatment for Teens with Back Pain.
Strong Back
We’ve already mentioned how teenagers who carry heavy backpacks are at risk of developing back pain. However, the solution is not stopping them from carrying loads on their back. The answer is training their backs to carry reasonable loads without risking back pain or any personal injury. They can do it with regular chiropractic visits. If there are underlying issues related to heavy backpacks, a chiropractor will fix them. In the end, chiropractic adjustments will make their back stronger.
Lifetime Healthy habits
Chiropractic care is not a short-term treatment but a long-term one. By seeing a chiropractor more regularly, Teens with Back Pain become used to the fact that they have to live a healthy lifestyle. So, they start adopting healthy habits that they can use for the rest of their lives. Whether it’s eating healthy, exercising correctly, or getting the posture right, they can learn them the right way. They simply appreciate the benefit of prevention.
Mental Wellbeing
Teenagers go through a lot in their lives that stresses them. In school, for example, they have to deal with the pressure of bettering their grades and performing in extracurricular activities. At home, they have to deal with social pressure. All these issues are partly the reason why depression is common among teens. So, it’s advisable to take them to see a chiropractor. Through spinal manipulation, they can experience mental calmness, and this immensely brings about stress relief and a better mood.
Injury Prevention/Healing
Both athletic and non-athletic teens live an active lifestyle. It means they are all prone to injuries. However, a majority of personal injuries that they sustain are preventable. Chiropractic adjustments can help with this for Teens with Back Pain. The adjustments realign the spine properly and flex the muscles to make them less susceptible to injuries.
Moreover, chiropractic adjustments help to fasten the healing process when the teen suffers an injury. By adjusting the spine, your teen’s immunity improves. It promotes natural healing.
Enhanced Athleticism
To perform better in sports at school, your teens with Back Pain needs to be very athletic. They have to be agile, stable, and mobile. All these are possible with routine chiropractic adjustments. By adjusting your teenager’s spine, a chiropractor can ease tension throughout the body. In this case, muscles become more relaxed, and joints are relieved from stiffness. It means that the overall mobility, on-field flexibility, and body balance is improved. Simply, your teenager becomes a better athlete.
Closing Thought
Teenage life is generally an active phase. So, you can’t stop them from living their life even if they are Teens with Back Pain. What you can do as a parent is to help them live it healthily. One way to do it is by recommending chiropractic care. As seen above, their life is likely to improve at all angles with chiropractic care than without it. The practice is not just an excellent treatment for most musculoskeletal issues but also an ideal preventive approach.
