Question was asked via my website: Over the past month, I have been experiencing severe lower back pain while lying in bed. I have no idea what’s causing it since I have not done any heavy lifting or unusual activity. Some nights the pain is so sharp that I can’t even fall asleep. Why is this happening to me?
My opinion: Back pain – which affects 80 percent of Americans at some point in their lives – is one of the top complaints in primary care practice. Make sure to have your primary care doctor check this out with an X-ray or MRI first. Assuming the outcome of the above is all good, you can then approach this issue holistically. Since your pain is worse when you lie down and you have not overexerted yourself, you could be suffering from muscle spasms, which are often brought on by a magnesium or calcium deficiency. You may be feeling bad now because warmer weather raises the risk of a magnesium shortfall.
To restore the proper flow of nutrients to muscle cells and ease your pain, try taking 300 mg of magnesium citrate once a day and 500 mg of calcium citrate once a day. I like Mag Citrate by Metagenics and Calcium Citrate by Douglas Labs available here: https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/skogan
You may also want to include magnesium-rich foods like wheat-bran cereal (if you are not gluten-sensitive) into your diet. If you are gluten sensitive, pumpkin seeds, bananas, avocadoes, and spinach are excellent sources of magnesium. It can take three to four weeks to correct the deficiency, so in the meantime, consider rubbing a bit of magnesium oil on your back before going to bed. The oil penetrates the skin and gets to the muscle layer, and could help improve the discomfort in about a week. I would also recommend Mind-Body techniques such as Progressive Muscle Relaxation, in which you can relax different parts of your body, one muscle group at a time. Another great holistic modality is Ondamed (pulsed low frequency electromagnetic fields) – a painless treatment in which the vibrational frequencies of the muscle groups receive a tune up. For acute pain, a series often 30-minute treatments are typically sufficient. For more information on Ondamed, check out my website www.customlongevity.com or ondamed.net
You may also want to include magnesium-rich foods like wheat-bran cereal (if you are not gluten-sensitive) into your diet. If you are gluten sensitive, pumpkin seeds, bananas, avocadoes, and spinach are excellent sources of magnesium. It can take three to four weeks to correct the deficiency, so in the meantime, consider rubbing a bit of magnesium oil on your back before going to bed. The oil penetrates the skin and gets to the muscle layer, and could help improve the discomfort in about a week. I would also recommend Mind-Body techniques such as Progressive Muscle Relaxation, in which you can relax different parts of your body, one muscle group at a time.
Another great holistic modality is Ondamed (pulsed low frequency electromagnetic fields) – a painless treatment in which the vibrational frequencies of the muscle groups receive a tune up. For acute pain, a series often 30-minute treatments are typically sufficient. For more information on Ondamed, check out my website www.customlongevity.com or ondamed.net
