Why Drugs Don’t Work to Get Rid of Back Pain & Other Issues

Whether you’re troubled by back pain or other aches & pains, research increasingly shows that steroids and anti-inflammatory drugs (e.g. ibuprofen) not only don’t work well to relieve pain, but ‘can actually increase a person’s chances of developing chronic pain’ (this and other quotes are from mainstream medical source, such as Medscape: details of my sources at the end of this post).

As with many short-term, ‘quick fix’ responses to pain, the problem is that using medications disrupts your body’s normal process of recovery from injury, over-use and everyday stresses and strains. This process includes allowing inflammation to do its thing (to promote neutrophils- - the white blood cells that fight infection and repair tissue).

One researcher, Aidan Cashin PhD, whose research out of Australia was published in the BMJ (July 2022), expressed his concern, too, that ‘so much of the research’ into anti-spasmodic meds being used to reduce pain wasn’t done very well, which means we can’t be very certain in the results’.

Overall, then, recent research strongly suggests that meds widely prescribed and advised for back pain relief (1) are ‘largely ineffective’, and (2) they likely increase the risks of an ‘adverse event’ – which might be anything from drowsiness, headaches, and dizziness, to the developing of chronic pain.

Despite these findings and concerns – along with those raised by medical doctors including Dr David Hanscom (a spine surgeon) and Dr Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen (a pain specialist) – many in mainstream healthcare remain unwilling to accept these findings, or to look for alternatives. Most continue to advise taking, and continue to prescribe these drugs not just for back pain, but for a wide range of aches and pains.

None of this is a big surprise to Certified Clinical Somatic Educators, including me. So many of our clients come to us out of desperation – worried that because drugs haven’t helped, along with physical and psychological therapies they may’ve undergone, or even surgery, there’s nothing that can relieve their pain, because they are truly ‘broken’.

This is so very, deeply saddening. (It also reminds me of my own experience with long-term pain, which is how I found Hanna’s Somatics.)

It’s so saddening because so much human pain – and almost all back pain – is caused by chronically over-tight muscles. And that is not something that can be ‘fixed’ by surgery, by therapies carried out on you, nor by medications that relax your muscles for you.

Why not? Why can’t these things fix you, from a Somatics point of view?

Basically, it’s because these pains come not from a structural problem, but from a functional issue: put simply, it’s because your brain (the motor-sensory part of it) has got ‘stuck’ in habits of movement and holding that are unhelpful for you. That is what causes so much pain, tightness, and tension.

Because it’s unconscious, unhelpful habits that create the pain (which, in turn, create the muscle tension and all the ‘symptoms’ that can give rise to), no-one else but YOU can make real change. Only YOU – from the inside, with YOUR access to YOUR brain – can truly release those over-tight muscles and keep them released.

How? By using gentle, conscious, pandiculated movements to re-train your brain into newer, more helpful, less tight and so less painful ways of moving.

So, you might ask, if all Somatics does is release muscle tension, why can’t you just take drugs that release muscle tension (anti-spasmodics, muscle relaxants, and the like)?

The point is that drugs that impose relaxation on your muscles – like physical therapies that (even gently) move your bones and muscles for you – don’t make lasting change, precisely because the changes are made from the outside. They are not made by you, and so your brain – your entire nervous system – tends to reject them, and to revert instead back to its own ‘normal’, even if that ‘normal’ is painful.

Your brain can only make real, lasting changes if YOU initiate them – if they’re made quite literally ‘from the inside’.

That’s why movement is so key to what we teach in Hanna’s Somatics work: first you learn to sense how you do move already – what your ‘normal’ is. You notice what might be unhelpful. You are then guided through a specific technique, and specific movement ‘exercises’, to help you re-train your brain out of those unhelpful ways of moving, to ways of moving that don’t create pain, and do enable you to move with more comfort, efficiency, and ease. That is how Hanna’s Somatics works.

The ’problem’ with medications – as with therapies and surgeries – is that they try to take a ‘short cut’ to doing what in fact your brain, your system, has to do for itself to get rid of pain, unhelpful patterns of movement, and stiffness and tension. But your brain knows this is a ‘short cut’ being imposed on it, and rejects it.

Worse, it seems that some drugs prescribed to help back pain and more, actually make things worse. One reason that Somatic Educators would suggest this happens is that the brain doesn’t get to understand the extent of the problem when drugs are sending confused signals, saying everything’s okay. This is the opposite of what we do in Somatics: when you use Somatics to alleviate pain, you do so by giving your brain MORE of the information it needs so that (instead of confusing it) it’s getting the info it needs to release unnecessary muscle tension, and so to relieve pain.

Check out information about the SoMA Somatics I teach elsewhere in this blog and website, in my free videos, and free video series, “The Truth About Pain - and how to get rid of it”.

Sources:

Ralph Ellis, ‘Using Anti-inflammatory Drugs May Prolong Back Pain,’ WebMD.com, 12 May 2022.

Megan Brooks, ‘Widely Prescribed Meds Ineffective for Low Back Pain?’ Medscape.com, 16 July 2021.

Gina Kolata, ‘Common Medications Can Prolong Back Pain, Study Says,’ New York Times, 11 May 2022.

Dr Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen, Pain: The Science of the Feeling Brain (Atlantic Books, 2021).

Dr David Hanscom, Back in Control: A Surgeon's Roadmap Out of Chronic Pain, 2nd edn (Vertus, 2016).