Physical Therapy can free you from opioid dependency

Back pain can be very debilitating. It affects up to 85% of Americans. It can prevent you from doing the things that you love.

Most of the time, people with back pain will go see their physician and then be prescribed opioids. The problem with this is that oftentimes the opioid medication will only mask the back pain symptoms and can cause dependency. There’s no evidence that opioids are effective at treating back pain. They only mask it until it becomes serious.

Opioid prescription can drive the dependency problem. The current medical model places more emphasis on medical imaging, opioid prescription, and surgery. This model doesn’t benefit the patient. It benefits the insurance companies.

“For the carriers that administer health insurance plans, there is far more profit in pills than physical therapy”.

The healthcare industry is based on incentives for companies, employers, and physicians to place patients on a long and winding path that benefits the insurance companies’ bottom line.

The most beneficial and proven way to treat something like back pain is education, exercise, and physical therapy.

We can reduce or abolish your dependency on opioids for treating your back pain.

I had this patient come to see me last year. He owned a landscaping company in New Jersey and had back pain for over 10 years. He had set up his truck’s seat with a bolster to support his back and told me that he had been taking Oxycodone for just as many years as he had back pain.

When he came in for physical therapy, he was stiff. His back had lost the ability to bend forward. It was almost locked in a straight, extended position. The bolster in his car was also keeping his back straight. Most probably, when he first started having back pain, whoever he saw instructed him to avoid bending forward, probably because it was the direction that increased his back pain symptoms.

So the surrounding tissue in his back and his joints learned not to bend. The opioids had become his go-to solution to his back pain. He couldn’t sit long, he couldn’t bend to pick things off the ground, he couldn’t do the things at work that he used to be able to do.

We worked on his back via soft tissue mobilization, joint mobilization, core stabilization, stretching, and body mechanics / posture education.

I told him that taking opioids for as long as he had been taking them is no way to live or treat his back pain. We had to work on getting his body comfortable at bending again. We had to work at reducing his anxiety and his belief that bending forward was bad and it would hurt his back more. We worked on his sitting posture, his car seat, to be able to round his back pain free and sit for prolonged periods pain free.

We ultimately broke his dependency on opioid medication and got him on a regular exercise program that included Pilates.

This is just one example of what physical therapy, education, and exercise can do for treating pain and abolishing the dependency on opioid medication.

At Par 5 Physical Therapy, we treat clients with back pain that prevents them from doing the things that they love. Each session is one-on-one for the duration of the treatment time. You spend more hands-on time here than other traditional physical therapy clinics. This is not your typical PT.

Contact Par 5 PT to learn more.