SpineFITyoga

Too hurt for SpineFITyoga?

…or aren’t sure?


SpineFitYoga is specifically designed to eliminate the overwhelming majority (90% or more) of neck and back pain. Particularly the kind known as chronic, recurrent, mechanical, and/or non-specific neck and back pain, what I prefer to call Basic Spine Pain. This is often the pain that your doctor, physical therapist, chiropractor, is taught to say is “normal” and something we must learn to live with. While living with this “normal pain” many end with needless misery, resulting in the number one source of disability worldwide. That said, with spine pain being so prevalent, the remaining 10% are still a substantial number of people. I’m hoping this page will offer guidance as to whether or not you are on the typical degenerative cascade of basic spine pain, and for a few, potentially lifesaving advice, helping any ten percenters know what their best move is.

It’s also important if I can lessen anxiety. Knowing you are one of the 90%, prevents angst that things are worse than they are, and brings peace of mind. One fact that should help is that if you are coming to SpineFitYoga looking for an active fix for your pain, as opposed to visiting an emergency room, that in itself is a very good sign. So while maybe 10% of people in the general population with neck and back pain are not immediately good candidates for SpineFitYoga, the very fact that you are reading this makes it more than 90% probable that you are not in that 10%. The following groups are not exhaustive, but are what I think will be most inclusive and understandable. If in doubt, of course, see your doctor. I’m dividing this into two groups, red flags and bad timing. Red flags are potentially an emergency, bad timing often requires some patience, after which SpineFITyoga will be great. And so…

Red Flags

The good news about red flags is that a question and answer format is generally agreed by emergency room experts as enough to tell if you need additional testing, or if they should send you home with a Motrin prescription and the usual advice to stretch and to “rest but stay active,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.

The bad news is that none of the questions are definitive, there is no exact consensus as to what questions should be asked and how many of them need to be answered yes before you need an x-ray, CT-scan, MRI, blood, or other types of tests. So while there is no definitive list of questions, there is reasonable agreement, and below I’m doing my best to blend questions from multiple sources together, make them understandable for laymen, and describe what positive “yes” answers could mean. 

A few, or even one, yes answers SHOULD worry you. If you have them, I would think an emergency room physician or family practitioner would be the best trained professional to get you additional tests or referrals. Or to verify that all’s well and you can safely proceed with SpineFITyoga.

1: Have you ever had any kind of cancer?

Though rare, cancer can affect the bones and discs of the spine causing pain. Usually when it does so, it has spread from another spot in the body that was affected first. By far the best predictor of current or future cancer is a past cancer. Thus, a yes to this question substantially raises the odds that current spine pain is from cancer as opposed to, or in addition to, basic spine pain caused poor posture, coordination, and fitness.

2: Have you recently and inexplicably lost weight?

Weight loss, for no apparent reason, is a known symptom of cancer, increasing the odds that spine pain is not basic.

3: Does rest, or other postural adjustments, fail to provide any relief of your spine pain?

While bed rest is generally considered a poor treatment for basic spine pain, if the pain is mechanical or postural, there are usually some positions that feel better than others, at least in the short term. Pain that is progressively worsening over weeks, is unchanging or unrelenting, regardless of rest and postural positions increases the odds that it could result from cancer or infection.

4: Have you recently had an unexplained fever?

Basic spine pain does not cause a fever. A fever could indicate an infection of spine, which while again is rare, can and does happen.

5: In the past 30 days have you been involved in significant trauma (e.g. a hard fall or car accident)?

A significant trauma increases the risk that the resulting pain is from a vertebral fracture.

6: Have you ever been diagnosed with osteoporosis?

Osteoporosis (reduced bone mineral density) increases the risk of vertebral fractures resulting from moderate, and even mild traumas (small falls, slower car accidents, even a cough or sneeze). If osteoporosis is advanced, compression fractures, common in the thoracic (middle) spine can happen even without trauma, often resulting in the noticeable rounded or hunchback postures in frailer elderly, often considered part of the normal aging process. Having osteoporosis or a compression fracture does not mean you can’t do SpineFitYoga, but you almost certainly want it to have recent fractures healed first. After which point SpineFitYoga, initiated cautiously with P5 perhaps before M5, and progressed with the user rules rigorously adhered to, should help slow and even reverse osteoporotic changes, lessening the risk of future fractures.

7: Are you over 50, or over 70 years of age?

Being over 50 years of age increases the likelihood of osteoporosis, diagnosed or not, and likewise increases risk of fractures from milder trauma. Over 70 years of age raises the risk yet again, as osteoporosis may be more advanced.

8: Have you ever used corticosteroids for a prolonged duration?

Prolonged use of corticosteroids weakens bones, increasing risk of fractures from otherwise milder stresses.

9: Have you had a recent onset of urinary or bowel incontinence or inability to void?

Loss of urinary or bowel control could indicate cauda equina syndrome. This is when nerves affecting each function, and more, are being pinched off in the low back, sometimes indicating a significant obstruction in the lumbar region requiring immediate surgery to decompress the nerves and prevent permanent disability. Cauda equina syndrome is a medical emergency!

10: Have you had a recent onset of numbness and/or tingling in your genitalia, anus, or perineum?

Numbness or tingling in the saddle region is also indicative of cauda equina syndrome, described above.

11: Do you have abdominal pain, and/or can you feel your heart beat throbbing in your abdominal region?

Basic back pain almost always hurts in the back, likewise basic neck pain almost always hurts in the back of the neck or shoulder blades. If back pain is going to refer pain anywhere it is usually down the leg. If neck pain is going to refer pain anywhere it is usually to the shoulder blades, or down one of the arms. If pain is in your side, or abdominal region it could be from any number of causes, and spine strain or degeneration is unlikely to be one. If you can feel the throbbing pulse of your heart beat in your abdomen it could be an abdominal aortic aneurysm; a rare but serious emergency condition for which you should go to an emergency room immediately. Pain in the front of the neck or throat region is unlikely to result from basic neck pain, and would also warrant consulting a physician.

12: Do you have progressive weakness in one or both arms or legs.

Progressive worsening muscle weakness of the arms and legs is indicative of something growing in the spine, especially serious if both right and left sides are affected.

13: Have you been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, with associated neck pain?

Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) weakens bone, cartilage, and ligaments throughout the body. This can be especially dangerous in relation to SpineFitYoga and the neck if the RA has weakened and destabilized the upper cervical spine, specifically C1-C2, in what is known as atlantoaxial subluxation. This can cause severe neck pain, headaches, numbness and weakness in the arms. What makes it especially dangerous is a portion of the C2 vertebra can press up into the brain causing sudden death. As with the rest of the red flags, this is a rare but very serious condition. The exercises of SpineFitYoga teach a neutral spine posture lessening stress on the passive structures of the neck, and strengthen the neck muscles increasing the bodies ability to stabilize the neck as well as the rest of the body. Thus SpineFitYoga should help many with RA, but if you have RA, having a rheumatologist or neurologist clear you for atlantoaxial subluxation before attempting the higher stress neck specific exercises like NeBrids, LoBrids, and FloRos in particular seems prudent.

14: Do you have any redness, heat, swelling around the spine.

Basic neck and back pain can be very painful and can be inflammatory. However, that inflammation is usually deep in the spine and DOES NOT show up on the outside body as redness, heat, or swelling. Such signs could be indicative of a cyst or skin infection. If it’s the latter you are probably going to want to see a physician for antibiotic treatment, and not expect SpineFitYoga to be the fix.

15: Have you tried SpineFITyoga conscientiously for 4 weeks, with no benefit to neck or back pain?

This one you don’t really know until after the fact, and could be the result of a few factors. Depending how bad your original condition is, it can take just a few days or many weeks and sometimes months for pain to fully resolve. If you are too far down the degenerative cascade, pain may never fully resolve and you are doing your best to keep it manageable. In such case SpineFitYoga can almost surely still help, however, pain should at least lessen within a few weeks with SpineFitYoga. Especially if you are incorporating the lessons learned in P5 throughout your day and thus no longer continuing the same behavior that damaged your spine in the first place. It could be that you are being too inconsistent with SpineFitYoga, or not doing the exercises properly. Regardless, if you have given SpineFitYoga, or any spine treatment a shot for 4 or so weeks without any benefit, and especially if your symptoms are getting worse, that’s a red flag that something out of the ordinary is wrong and needs to be corrected.

Hopefully you don’t have any Red Flags. If you do my suggestion is you talk over any yes answers with your physician ASAP. It is hoped that you can get them cleared or successfully treated so that you may then safely begin SpineFitYoga. If you have a vertebral fracture, cauda equina syndrome, or atlantoaxial instability SpineFitYoga could easily make you worse. If you have cancer or infection SpineFitYoga could perhaps be a distraction, delaying much needed timely care. Again red flags are rare, indicating a less than 1% cause of spine pain, but when red flags are present it is important that their cause be determined, cleared and/or treated as quickly as possible.

Bad Timing

Whereas a Red Flag is an aberration from basic spine pain requiring care apart from SpineFitYoga, bad timing is a temporary exacerbation within the usual degenerative cascade of events causing basic spine pain for which SpineFitYoga is still designed to fix. Albeit bad timing requires increased patience and care early on. Bad timing is also a matter of degree, which ranges from having overstretched some ligaments after a day bent over gardening (for which you may not need any rest at all before starting SpineFitYoga) to where you just got whiplash in a car accident, or you just herniated a disc bending over to empty a dryer. In the worser cases the resulting pain and stiffness in the neck or back can be extreme, likely with numbness, tingling and/or more pain referring down an arm or leg. In such situations you might be looking at the exercises of M5 (Muscle-5), even O5 (Posture-5), and thinking, “no way.” So what then?

Example: Whiplash

To a degree you need to be patient, and hard as it may seem, be positive because things almost always get better from here. If you were just involved in a car accident, and x-rays show nothing is broken, you can expect pain to last a variable number of weeks, but time is your friend. Whiplash is not the result of poor posture, but now that muscles and ligaments in the spine are sprained and strained, poor posture will impair healing. As such educating yourself about the everyday CAUSES OF SPINE PAIN, though they weren’t your cause, will be of much use in creating an optimal healing environment. Regrettably there isn’t a lot you can do to rush healing and much of what people (including therapists) do to make spine pain better turns out to make it worse. Stretching? No, not a good idea. 

So educating yourself about the above causes will help you avoid common pitfalls, not to mention saving you hundreds or thousands of dollars on treatments that are marginal at best. Next reading the USER RULES will give you an idea of how to start SpineFitYoga gently and safely. I would suggest P5 at first using the stick as a guide to keeping things neutral. Only when you can do all of P5 perfectly without any increase in pain would I start M5, again keeping the user rules foremost. Particularly rules 4 and 6. As time allows for healing you’ll be able work towards more steady progress. It’s worth keeping in mind that in the middle of a flare up, doing absolutely nothing is counterproductive, but so is trying to force progress. There is a limit to how fast chemical reactions of healing in the body take place that likely can’t be accelerated, but you certainly can get in their way and mess things up either by being unaware of what hinders healing, or trying too hard, even with good exercises like SpineFitYoga. A ballpark guess as to when you should be starting P5 would be after 1-3 weeks post injury and M5 4-8 weeks post injury. 

Example: Freshly Herniated Disc

According to radiologic research, herniating a disc in the neck or back can be so uneventful that you don’t even notice, but frequently it will gather all of your attention. Likely sending you to the ER, for which x-rays (which show only bone) will come back normal. An MRI will likely show, what we already expected, the nucleus of your disc protruding rearward, often causing much pain and inflammation. If it’s your neck it could easily be irritating nerves going to and from your arm on same side as the herniation. Likewise if it’s a lumbar herniation pain, numbness and tingling might be traveling down one of your legs. Should you get an MRI? Generally not, so long as Red Flags #9 and #10 are not raised, an MRI only shows what we all expected to see anyway, and what it shows does not affect how you should treat it.

Herniated discs are almost always a case of the straw that broke the camel’s back. Thus you may think “it came out of nowhere,” or think it was when you bent over “that one time” but research very strongly suggests it’s from repeated and long held bending and twisting of the spine. And “that one time” you bent over to unplug a vacuum was really the 20,000th time you bent over that way, bending at your waist and not your hips. So even more so than the whiplash example, you need to cognitively know the CAUSES OF SPINE PAIN, learn to avoid them. Learn the USER RULES of SpineFitYoga, and if pain is severe rest for a short time, rest with a neutral spine, watch the videos of P5 to see what a neutral spine is, then gradually practice being able to do so, and don’t expect it to be as easy as you think. Research has found people with herniated discs have lesser trunk/hip coordination. It’s not known if the lack of coordination is the cause or result of the herniation but I expect the relationship is bidirectional. As with whiplash, once you can do P5 properly, with the stick at first, without increasing your pain, perhaps after 4-8 weeks start M5 at L1 to build strength and stamina. As the pain comes down you can go harder, and as you build strength pain should continue to come down. But again, don’t rush, progress using pain as your guide, emphasizing USER RULES 4 and 6. When pain is gone and you are getting 100% of goals at L2 you will know you are doing great.

Good news for herniated discs is your body should reabsorb the material, thus unpinching the painful nerves over time. The bad news that disc will be evermore a little flatter, and ligaments spanning it a little looser, so SpineFitYoga, particularly M5 is important to better stabilize that segment going forward.