Back pain can be crippling. It can be annoying. It can impact your quality of life. Back pain can be the thing that makes you stop playing the sport you love, the thing that makes you wince when you pick your kids up or it can just be that nagging pain that is always there. Back pain can also impact your ability to concentrate and perform your job to the best of your abilities.

The experience of back pain can be quite different for each person. You might suffer from a brief episode or from constant unrelenting pain every day but it’s important to understand why you have pain.

What We Do

At Sydney Advanced Physio we pride ourselves on the results we get treating spinal issues.

When you come in to see one of our physios we will do a head to foot alignment check and have a look at how your spine is working. When you have leg pain or pins and needles, we will also likely need to check for tension in your nervous system.

It’s important to understand that your back is impacted by your entire body. Your nervous system runs from your head to your toes. Your feet are the foundation for your entire body. Your connective tissue links one muscle to the next and if one area isn’t working well it makes it extremely difficult the rest of your body to work well. When an area of your body is struggling to function normally it can increase the load on other joints, on your discs or on your nervous system. This can mean your muscles are turning on in the wrong order, some muscles are overworking and some are barely working at all. Looking at the way your whole body works as a unit, the way you use your muscles, and looking at the way your joints move (or don’t move) when you do a task helps us work out what’s going wrong, and what we need to do to help you.

Frequently for patients with back pain we will also do a Real Time Ultrasound assessment. This allows us to have a look at what is actually happening when you try and engage your pelvic floor or when you try and engage your ‘core’ (your transversus abdominus). This helps us establish if we need to help you retrain the way your muscles are working. This will often occur in a follow up appointment and in order for us to be as accurate as possible when doing the scan you need to make sure your bladder is not empty – it doesn’t have to be full, just not empty.

The spine is quite a complex structure and every persons problem is different. Our physios understand that everyones situation and injury are different and we’ll work with you to try and help you get the result you want so that you can sit comfortably at work, run a marathon, pick up your kids without worrying about your back – whatever it is that you want to do.

We believe that understanding what is going on with your back is a key part of truly fixing the issue rather than simply putting a band-aid over the problem. To try and help with this, we have made a series of videos about back pain that are attached to this page. For more videos, up to date information and pictures, check out our Facebook page.