Case: Severe Recurrent Acute Lumbar Disc Injury

Detailed explanations on how to manage Lumbar disc injury is provided Here.

Case

Middle aged man who has been coming into clinic before. Obese, low flexibility in lower body, lumbar and thoracic spine. Patient has had previous disc lumbar injury multiple times but without sciatica. Patient mentioned that he was doing a lot of lifting light boxes repetitively the day before. Patient is not experiencing any neural symptoms and showing no neurological sign involvement.

Findings

On visual, patient had pain with walking, sitting, and lying. Compression test was negative, but this itself is not enough to rule out disc injury as history suggests lumbar disc injury. Chance of acute recurrent lumbar disc injury is high. According to the guideline, we would need to refer for MRI but as I knew this patient well, I was able to treat the patient safely as I knew what treatments worked well on him.

Treatment

Lumbar traction was given as the main treatment, the traction followed a method which was stated by Korean randomised clinical trial. As we had to target the pain first, TENS and cupping was applied at the same time. As these were not an invasive treatment which doesn’t have any side effects, I overdosed the treatment time on the traction machine and TENS. These involed automatic traction machine and automatic cupping machine.

After treatment

Patient did feel loose after the session but was not able to tell straight away of the difference but when he stood up and walked, he was able to tell that bending forward does not hurt him which was hurting before he came in.

Follow Up

Patient was called the next day in the afternoon, he mentioned that he slept in without waking up (patient woke up every 20 minutes before treatment). No pain in the morning.

Conclusion

Usually, it doesn’t heal this fast. But people who had disc injuries before tend to bounce back very quick because the body knows what to do and patient also knows a little bit into what they should avoid. Also the overdose of treatment helped. Cupping tends to speed the healing time as it brings in new blood into the injured site, especially automatic cupping is a good treatment as it constantly vacuums by itself.