Back pain relief can come in many forms. Whether your discomfort has been caused by overuse, misuse, atrophy, or sleep positioning, different solutions may work better than others.Pain RelieversWhile ...

Back pain relief can come in many forms. Whether your discomfort has been caused by overuse, misuse, atrophy, or sleep positioning, different solutions may work better than others.

Pain Relievers

While many over-the-counter medications claim to help with back pain, your best bet is probably an anti-inflammatory like ibuprofen. Most medical professionals agree that the generic forms of these medications are no less effective than their higher-priced, name-brand peers.

You'll want to make sure to take these pills on a full stomach to avoid nausea, though, and you need to realize that these don't provide a long-term solution: Taking ibuprofen over an extended period of time can cause stomach ulcers. Of course, like any medication, you should be careful to follow dosing instructions included in the packaging.

Hot and Cold Therapy

Instead of simply relieving back pain, alternately using hot and cold therapy can help alleviate the inflammation or strained muscles that are causing you discomfort. Cold therapy, usually including ice or other frozen substitutes, slows and helps reduce the inflammation and swelling as well as impeding the progress of tissue damage. By contrast, heat therapy can soothe and relax strained muscles, even unlocking tightness in order to allow for stretching, which in turn helps reduce stiffness.

Alternating hot and cold therapy can help you maximize the benefits of these complementary methods of alleviating your symptoms. You'll want to be careful to protect your skin from the extreme temperatures, though, and you may want to use this kind of treatment in conjunction with one or more of the other methods mentioned.

Stretching and Exercising

Sometimes, the problem is stiffness, which can be caused by poor posture, continual sitting, or unhealthy sleep positioning. In order to alleviate existing discomfort, slowly and cautiously beginning a stretching routine can help.

If your job requires you to sit for long periods of time, taking periodic breaks to walk around for even just 5 minutes per hour can help reduce the stiffness that you tend to feel at the end of every shift. Maybe the only issue isn't that you're sitting but that you're using poor posture or a chair or office set-up that produce unnecessary strain.

Healthy Habits

While the solutions mentioned above may help immediate concerns, there is simply no substitute for forming healthy habits. If the discomfort you're experiencing is not due to a one-time injury, but is becoming a chronic condition, you need to look at the aspects of your lifestyle that may be contributing to the problem and change those practices.

Sleep-related issues may include an old or otherwise unhealthy mattress. If you sleep on a surface that's too hard or too soft, you may wake up with a stiff or sore back, every single day.

Article Tags: Back Pain Relief, Back Pain, Pain Relief, Cold Therapy