Lower Back Pain also called Lumbago

Lower back pain, also called lumbago, may have any of a number of causes, including injury or strain to the lower spine, arthritis or a slipped disc. But sometimes it seems to have no cause.

With modern understanding of how pain works and affects us, severe lower spinal pain where there seems to be no obvious cause of the pain is increasingly being treated as a disorder in itself. This is especially true in cases of chronic spinal pain.

It has been shown that people can undergo surgery under hypnosis, without experiencing the pain they would most certainly have experienced without hypnosis. Amputees experience pain in limbs that aren't there. Shark bite victims talk about feeling no pain at the moment of being attacked.

Everyone experiences pain differently. Two people with the same injury may express pain differently depending on their attitude towards pain and showing emotion, their emotional state and the circumstances when the pain started.

Simply put, a soldier will physically experience as well as express the pain of a pin prick very differently to the way pain is expressed and felt by a small child.

On the opposite extreme, a so-called sexually frigid person may feel no physical sexual stimulation from sensations most non-frigid people would be unable to not respond to.

This seems to indicate that pain is something more than measurable physical damage and needs to be treated as such. It's also why natural treatments like acupuncture and mental suggestion like hypnosis seem to have such a positive, even profound, effect on sufferers of severe lower spinal pain.

Acupuncture - the insertion of needles in certain energy areas of the body - can create an altered perception of pain. Studies have shown that often pain relief is a case of mentally coming to terms with pain as a bodily sensation that can be controlled by the mind. Pain is sometimes caused by fear. Hypnosis is often used to cure fears - like fear of flying or fear of dentistry. Acupuncture and hypnosis are essentially treatments that use the mind to take back control of physical sensation.

It is no surprise in light of the above that one of the most debilitating side-effects of severe lower back pain is depression and sleeping problems and that the healthier a person is - both emotionally and physically - the better they are able to cope with severe lower spinal pain.

Having said that, sufferers of severe lower spinal pain include healthy, active, happy and youthful sports people, film stars, doctors, lawyers and psychologists. Coming to terms with back pain may, ironically, be the best way to cure it.