Upper Back Pain

Do you hold your daily stress and tension in your shoulders and between your shoulder blades?  This is unfortunately true for most Americans!  Our country overall undergoes more stress due to our fast-paced lifestyles, our busy overworked schedules, and our money problems due to over-spending.  This can make our shoulders and shoulder blades feel like giant boulders.  Massage therapy and Chiropractic care can correct these imbalances between the muscular and skeletal systems.  A massage therapist will perform techniques like trigger point release and muscle stripping to locate trigger points within the muscles.  Trigger points when touched will refer pain to another location.  This may feel like a tingling sensation to an electrical shock.  When these spots don’t refer pain, they’re referred to as tender points by default.  Either way, these spots cause local pain and inflammation and distort normal posture.  A massage therapist will apply ischemic compression with their hands until the hyper-irritable musculature melts below their fingertips.  This may take many treatments to alleviate since these areas were probably there for a long time.  It’s important to realize that a Chiropractor and/or massage therapist cannot fix everything in one visit.

Treatments

There are many treatments to safely and effectively treat upper back pain.  Two were mentioned earlier, massage therapy and Chiropractic care.  Some other treatments include Acupuncture, hydrotherapy applications like heat and ice, electrical muscle stimulation, cold laser therapy, ultrasound, diathermy, physical therapy rehabilitation, and exercises such as pilates or yoga.  Your physician will choose the most appropriate source of treatment for your pain and the severity of your condition.