People can hurt their upper back area from the wrong position like watching TV or during sleep; from poor posture habits at their work station or from performing excessive fitness or sports activities. Injuries are a common cause of neck pain: vehicular injuries, sports injuries, and some work injuries.
Naturally, the body initiates a full healing process, but often enough the healing is incomplete, leaving scar tissues and weakened structures that cause instabilities of the spinal joints and eventual misalignments of the spine. Over time these misalignments contribute to arthritis, thoracic spondylosis (lipping and spurring around the joints and discs), and degenerative disc disease; to pinched nerves that cause radiating pains around the ribs, often mistaken for a heart problem if on the upper left side of the ribs.
Fortunately, a person can have their back checked by a Doctor of Chiropractic if there is a lot of pain but even better when there is just stiffness or mind occasional pain; before the pain becomes intolerable.
Unfortunately, too many people know little to nothing about chiropractic and over time they see their neck problems become increasingly more complicated. Time is not your friend in situations like this. It is important to have the upper back checked for spinal misalignments where soft tissues are producing stiffness, tension, pain, and restricted movements.
Looking at the different tissues that contribute to upper back problems we find they are injured or irritated by several things:
- – Nerves become swollen and inflamed due to constraining pressure from swollen joints as the nerves leave the spine and branch outward. In the case of nerves, the pain can follow the length up into the head or down the length of the arm.
- Ligament pain is caused by excessive stretching and tearing of the partly elastic fibers due to acute trauma (accidents, injuries) or due to wrong head/neck positional stress while awake or asleep.
- Cartilage pain is caused by inflammation and compressive forces due to vertebral misalignments.
- Muscle pain is caused by overuse that makes the muscle fibers tear or become inflamed; this is due to overexertion, and sudden loss of heat (laming). Poor posture with the head in the forwarding position too long.
- Tendons become painful for the same reasons ligaments hurt.
- Connective tissues can be overstretched by mechanical forces or by pockets of swelling due to inflammation.
In upper back pain, it is typically the soft tissues like nerves, ligaments, cartilage, muscle, tendons, and connective tissues that are damaged that are responsible for the pain. So when the correct tissues are identified the solution becomes much clearer.
In closing, we are enclosing a random list of symptoms that have been reported by patients to have improved following their chiropractic care while resolving their upper back pain: less pain in the upper back, chest, around the ribs, or radiating from the gallbladder, improved neck, and shoulder mobility, reduced asthma, and allergies, resolved chronic sputum discharge, better breathing, fewer stomach problems.
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