Chronic Back Pain

Hello everyone, my name is Dr. Pallavi Singh. I am a physiotherapist for the last thirteen years and for nine years, I am practicing specifically in podiatry, podiatry is a science which is concerned with your foot alignment, gait and posture.

So what we typically see at our clinic is a lot of patient visit to us with chronic back pain. There are some people who have been like in sports or some activity and they had an injury which is causing the back pain, it is basically happening because of some immediate trauma. But, the chronic back pain is something that you are experiencing over a period of time, so you go to a doctor you get yourself treated sometimes it gets settled down with medication, sometimes you go to a physiotherapist you take five to ten session to rectify this pain and then it works, it works for three months, six months, but the pain keep on coming back again and now you get frustrated, you don't understand why this pain is happening to me? why am I getting that nagging pain on and on? and you are doing your level best in terms of exercises, modifications, precautions but still this pain is bothering. So maybe this time when you feel this kind of pain and this is not going back with your regular exercises and everything maybe you can consider getting your feet checked.

So what happens typically, your feet serve as the base of support for your whole body, now if you have a bad alignment at both the feet or sometimes at one feet so supposingly five or ten years back, you are walking around and you sprained your ankle so you can have bad alignment at one side or both sides. For one side, let's take an example you were playing, you sprain your ankle, your feet fall and twisted inside now sometimes this sprained get treated, sometimes we find like the injury was very less so we didn't go for a proper treatment or correction or anything of that sort and over a period of time these feet start getting more flattened and start turning inward. When this happens you have a unilateral collapse from one side, now as an effect of this your body is shortened on one side and lengthened on one side which is in terms you can say a leg length discrepancy, now this is not like a true shortening it's an apparent shortening.

When you are walking with this alignment the spine pays the price for it, so your pelvis which is supposed to be in square or centre started tilting towards one side, now this tilt can cause the rotation of your spine and can lead to further misalignment at the spinal level. This pain is something which is not treatable with normal exercises till the time you don't get your spine balanced and in the centre, this pain will keep on nagging and bothering you.

So a proper correction in this line would be getting the overpronation corrected on the right side, when the right side is levelled with the left side then the whole leg is in same alignment which will release the pressure from your spine and maybe this time your back pain will go for good. If you are having this chronic back pain again, now this time go for a foot evaluation maybe that can help you in solving the problem much faster.

This is Dr. Pallavi Singh, thank you for watching the video.
Thank you