It’s an unfortunate fact that back pain is one of the current exceptions in modern medicine. Doctors these days can treat just about anything, except back pain. There’s still a real lack of understanding when it comes to figuring out why back pain occurs and what causes it in the first place. This means that many people go undiagnosed and thus untreated.
Back Pain Overview
Back pain affects 80 percent of all Americans during some point in their lives. This will obviously vary in severity, and it’s only a serious disability for some, but the condition itself is quite common in general. There are various ways to diagnose back pain but none of them are full proof. You can do spinal X-rays for example. There’s also the EMG test and others. But in order to get the tests done to begin with, you have to convince health insurance people that you have a serious enough problem for it to be worth getting tests. And if nothing shows up on the tests, many doctors might be keen to say that the pain isn’t there, and that it’s all just in your head, even though back pain isn’t well understood and it’s fully believable to say that the tests may not actually pick up on the cause. A negative back pain test doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have back pain, in other words.
Unrelenting
What makes back pain so hard on sufferers is the combination of how unrelenting it is with how people may not believe you even have it. This can create psychological difficulties on top of the physical ones. Back pain tends to wear you down since there’s often no hiding from it. Even lying on a bed may not make the pain go away entirely.
Being Taken Seriously
One of the biggest problems with those who suffer back pain is the fact that many doctors don’t take them seriously. The reason for this is that pain is one of those things that often remain unquantifiable by doctors. Something like your weight, or how much cholesterol you have is easy for doctors to figure out with a simple test. But when it comes to pain they have to take your word for it. If a doctor believes that you are lying or exaggerating your condition, then you will get nothing but the run around from them. This could interfere with getting medical help.
Getting Help
But the truth of the matter is that you do feel intense, pain in your lower back that debilitates you and makes it all but impossible for you to work until you get the right medical help. If this is the case for you, then it’s a good idea for you to fill out an SSI online application to get some insurance and some real help with your problem instead of an interminable run around from those who don’t really want to believe you.