Lower Back Pain – First Steps

Transcript

So let’s recap about back pain, which is acute, sudden onset with leg pain, which most likely is, I’ve said signals that one of the nerves is being pushed on. And again, the starting point is with an anti-inflammatory and anti-inflammatories in the form of Naproxen sodium or Ibuprofen are appropriate. The brace doesn’t help much. Some people will believe that the next step is seeing a physician and that it may be involved physical therapy, but for really acute leg pain, that’s usually not going to help much. There may be a steroid burst, which is a three, five, seven, nine day intense regimen of either a slightly declining number of pills or a consistent number of pills and the steroids you may have heard of such things as hydrocortisone, which isn’t used very often or prednisone, which is used more often, and many neurosurgeons such as myself, use dexamethasone. Then if the patient’s still isn’t doing better, the imaging studies become important because you want to see what the real pathology is.