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About a place that has what are called MEDX machines. These are lumbar isolating exercise pieces, that isolate the muscles in the low back, I will say this, THEY ARE UNCOMFORTABLE AT FIRST AND YOU WILL BE SORE FOR THE FIRST FEW SESSIONS, ESPECIALLY THE STATIC TESTING,but, the end is definitely worth it. Also McKenzie stretches, they are extension exercises for the low back. Extension is a very good way to alleviate pressure put on the discs. Many people have significant amount of back pain because they never use the tiny intrinsic intervertebral muscles in their back.. People use their quads, hamstrings and gluteal muscles , BUT, when those muscles become overloaded, boom, pain...Because the other muscles in the back arent equipped to deal with the forces being applied to them...I used to treat pre and post surgical C and L spine patients and used the MedX equipment and had amazing results with a lot of my patients...AND BE CAREFUL OF SURGICAL INTERVENTION... Many times the scar tissue that remains after the surgery is more of a pain in the back than the original problem...Sorry for the play on words..

I have had chronic pain for 2 years now. They went conservative until about 2 months into it. It was when I wanted to end it I was dying in pain.  Then they recommended the aggressive medicines. To be honest, they have helped me considerably and have improved the way I live to the point of being able to work again. The injections did not help though.

I have experienced severe shocking pain in my right leg that raidiates from my crotch and very bad pain pain too. They did an MRI and defiantly saw the 2 herniated but they saw the degenerated disks. I am just wondering if surgery is the answer. Oxycontin and Dilaudid work but taking medicine isnt fixing the problem right? So surgery fixes the problem so here I am. All i can tell you is that it has been 2 years and I havent gotten better except with these medicines. Any thoughts?

I went to my Doctor today and was told that I am have phase II disk degeneration. This is the exact same thing the Chiro told me also. The Doc said that there is no surgery that can fix degeneration. As it gets bad they can repair some of the damage with fusions or rods but degeneration is just that. It is bone loss and really can't be fixed. Mine was started by a car wreck I was in when I was 17. I was pronounced DEAD by two EMT crews at the scene and left in my car until my Dad got there. He said when he touched me I punched him in head and started screaming at him. Needless to say the Good Lord did not want me yet so he sent me back for some reason. I am now 43 and suffer some degree of pain every day. So, I will use drug therapy and physcial therapy. I am going to start some type of excersize program I guess. I have had one surgery alredy in 2003 to repair a stenosis in my L4 and I don't want to do that again. I am to young for this.

My suboxone patients would say that it is way to easy to get pain medications from doctors, and it should be harder in order to decrease abuse and diversion.  So what are you going to do!

An MRI by itself will not diagnose the cause of back pain or tell you if you need surgery, and may not be necessary in the absence of neurologic symptoms that are either progressive or have been present for several weeks to months.  I don't know what the surgeon said, but what he probably ment was, "there is no reason to do an MRI at this point unless based on your symptoms and exam, we are planning on doing surgery, in which case the MRI will tell us how badly and how many levels are affected."

In some cases pain medication is not warrented until the medical evaluation is complete. 

Hi.  I just turned 30 and I have DDD bigtime, as well as schmorel's nodes/spondelosis.  I have 6 degenerated discs, 3 that are really bad.  (about 70% thinned).   Yes the pain from this is absolutely horrible since when your discs get thinner the space allowed for the nerves to escape the sides of your spine gets narrowed causing crushed nerves.

 I take 2 x 30mg Oxycodone pills every 4 hours but only on really bad days.  Generally I take about 9 or 10 of these a day.

I cannot be opperated on right now which stinks because I have spondelosis in 12 vertabrea and that would make fusion after disc replacement a really hard thing to accomplish and would probably have to keep being refused because of the constant changing bone structure.  I go to the Lahey Clinic in Boston which is one of the top 10 spine centers in the whole U.S.  I want to be cut so bad and have them try SOMETHING but everyone refuses to opperate on me because my spine is so ugly.

~Mike G.