Relieve My Back Pain

Back pain is as common as the common cold. It has been estimated that about 90% of all adults in America will suffer from back pain at some point in their lives. Every year about 65 million Americans buy some kind of over-the-counter product for the purpose of relieving back pain.

One can hardly turn on the television without seeing a commercial for some kind of miracle back pain-relieving medication. Some of these medications are of the oral variety and some of them are of the topical variety. You will likely be very familiar with many of these products. They are household names.

Anybody who has ever suffered minor back pain has taken a couple of aspirin and rubbed one of the muscle pain-relieving products on the sore spot. For minor muscle strains that cause back pain, these measures are very effective and will relieve the pain. Given a few days, the pain will disappear and all treatment can be stopped. A minor muscle strain that causes back pain will be gone in a few days — it would be gone without any medications being swallowed or rubbed on.

The only purpose of these over-the-counter medications is to help relieve the pain and decrease it to a manageable level until the body takes care of the problem. These over-the-counter medications do not HEAL the muscle strain — the body does that. The medications just help relieve the pain.

Minor back strains happen in everyday life. Unless there are muscle spasms, there is rarely any need to consult a doctor or other health care professional. A couple of aspirin or Tylenol and a rub-on analgesic will take care of the problem.

If the pain persists, however, you should not continue to take over-the-counter medications without consulting your doctor.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Back Pain, OTC Medications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.