Physiotherapy For

Lower Back Pain

Lower Back Pain Treatment in Daisy Hill, North Lakes & Eight Mile Plains

The lower back is an incredible structure of interconnecting bones, ligaments, nerves, and joints all working cohesively to support the upper body and provide strength and flexibility. The Brisbane Spine Clinic has a particular interest in this complex structure and understands the pain and frustration a lower back injury can cause you. Read on to find out some of the common causes and symptoms of lower back pain.

explaining lower back pain

Common symptoms

  • Sharp burning pain
  • Muscle tightness and spasm
  • Difficulty standing or walking
  • Tingling or numbness of lower extremities

Common causes of lower back pain

  • Repetitive movements
  • Loading of the spine
  • Disc bulge
  • Impinged or inflamed nerve

Lower Back Pain Symptoms

The lower back is tasked with supporting the upper body as well as providing mobility for everyday activities such as bending down or twisting. Most acute lower back pain is a result of an injury to the ligaments, facet joints, discs or muscles.

The symptoms of low back pain can range from mild and tolerable pain to debilitating symptoms severely affecting your ability to perform even the most basic tasks. Depending on the underlying cause, common symptoms may include:

  • Sharp burning pain that radiates to the back of the legs
  • Muscle tightness and spasm
  • Difficulty standing or walking
  • Tingling or numbness of lower extremities also known as Sciatica

Types of Lower Back Pain

Pain in your lower back comes in all shapes and form, for ease of understanding, it can be generally classified into the following 2 categories.

Mechanical Pain

This would be the most common cause of lower back pain, especially by those who perform repetitive movements or tasks for work or daily activities.  It is normally brought on by loading the spine and causes injury to the muscles, ligaments or joints around the spine. In this case, back pain may be felt after squatting or deadlifting. There is usually a mechanical pattern to the symptoms, for example, a certain direction of movement or certain postures will aggravate or ease symptoms. By identifying these mechanical patterns, it will help our consultants here at The Brisbane Spine Clinic to diagnose your true cause of lower back pain a lot more efficiently.  The pain is normally localised in lower back, but can radiate to the buttocks and legs.

Radicular Pain

This type of pain is normally associated with an impinged or inflamed spinal nerve. The pain is normally sharp or burning and can cause numbness and weakness. As it is a nerve pain, it is usually only felt on one side of the body. In more severe cases, this type of back pain can result in nerve function loss (Please see sciatica), examples of this is patients may complain of a dead patch with no sensation in their lower leg or foot, or feeling of lower limb giving way unexpectedly, easy to be tripped during walking and unable to move ankle up for walking. Patients that complain of being unable to pass urine or loss of feeling, or experiencing numbness in the pubic areas may warrant immediate medical attention as these are signs of advanced central nervous system dysfunction and needs to be investigated and treated urgently.

As low back pain symptoms can often lead to flare-ups and recurrence, at Brisbane Spine Clinic, we believe a thorough examination is important to understand not only the symptoms but the exact cause of your symptoms to provide appropriate treatment and prevention of chronic lower back pain down the track. (See Our Care Pathway)

Lower Back Pain and Abdominals

Spinal Consultants Caroline Sui, Justin Lin and Leo Hyun discuss the impact overactive abdominals can have on lower back pain.

Physiotherapy Exercises for Lower Back Pain

Strengthening the muscles that support your lower back can help ease pain and reduce the risk of its recurrence. Often exercises will aim to strengthen your core muscles and stretch out your back to relieve tension. It’s worth getting into the habit of doing your exercises for a few minutes every day.

Before starting any exercises, we recommend you consult your physiotherapist who can advise you on which ones are most suitable for your current needs and abilities.

Lower Back Pain Treatment in Daisy Hill

The Brisbane Spine Clinic has a particular interest in helping patients overcome debilitating pain by offering non-invasive and non-surgical lower back pain physiotherapy treatment options.

During a comprehensive examination of your individual symptoms, our consultants will investigate and find out the true cause of your lower back pain symptoms and identify all risk factors that may have developed which has lead to your symptoms. By having a traditional medical approach, it is usually tunnel-visioned and inadequate to solve the complex nature of lower back pain or spinal pain if assessment and treatment were only performed on the painful areas. This may be the reason why you had no results with many practitioners or doctors in the past.

With some doctors or therapists that have failed to examine the lower back as a complex structure, just by treating the symptomatic areas, patients usually have poor results. It is then at this point, a lot of patients were offered surgeries for lower back pain, not because it was the best solution, but it was simply the last destination from a series of trial and error management options despite surgical intervention may be the best intervention method to manage a proportion of lower back pain or spinal pain patients.

This is not good enough! We believe there is still a lot of patients that will have great results without surgery! We do not play trial and error with the health and well-being of our valued patients.

We believe that our whole body functions as one unit and we may treat multiple areas throughout the whole body and not just the lower back or the sciatic nerve to achieve the best outcome.

Find out how our team at The Brisbane Spine Clinic may be able to help you solve your condition with back pain physiotherapy options.

Senior Musculoskeletal Consultant

Mr Justin Lin

  • B.Phty 2009 UQ
  • CSMT (Certificate in Spinal Manual Therapy) 2010
  • Kinesiotape Level 1 2010
  • Ridgway Method Paradigm 2011
  • M. Phty (Musculoskeletal) 2013 UQ
  • Mulligan Concept Upper Quadrant 2015
  • Mulligan Concept Lower Quadrant

Why choose our clinic

From the moment you book in for your back pain physiotherapy consultation till the completion of your spinal treatments, you will realise The Brisbane Spine Clinic difference.

  • Peace of mind
  • Trust
  • Clear communication
  • Dedication and commitment
  • Highest level of care
  • Problem-solving approach
  • Second opinions
  • Non-invasive treatment