Why do women have back pain?
Dr. Ramin Raiszadeh: Back pain is the number one, is a very prevalent problem in our society. 90% of patients will have some sort of back pain in their lifetime. So it could be either a muscle strain. It could be something more significant. So most of the time, if you have, if my wife, my kids come in there and say, you know, complaining of a lot of back pain, most of the time it gets better with time, and that’s because it’s muscle.
When it doesn’t get better in time, and by time, I mean six weeks. So 90% of the patients will get better within about a six-week time frame. So if it does not get better in six weeks, you have to look at other causes for the back pain.
Now for women and men it’s the same thing. Now it could be either a disc herniation. It could be there’s instability in the spine. There could be that there’s motion of the spine that you can’t detect, and there could either be facet type pain where those are the joints in the back that allow you to move forward and backwards like your knee joints, like your hip joints. Your spine has similar joints, and so when those become worn out, when they become problematic, they can cause back pain as well.
So the more common things of what we see a lot is the muscle strains, aches where they stand up and pick up your baby, you stand up and breastfeeding all the time, or you stand up in your shopping, or you know, doing the basic activities of daily living, or if you are at work and you are working and you are sitting in the desk a lot.
A lot of these times when you are doing these activities and you are not exercising your back to keep your core strong, and what I mean by core is not just your belly, but also your back, you are inevitably going to have some sort of problem down the road if you don’t keep your muscles strong. So, a lot of causes for it, but a lot of them will go away with time.