It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out pain is a signal that something is wrong with the body. Whether your back suddenly “goes out” and drops you to the floor in pain, or you simply struggle through general aches and muscle weakness day after day, sooner or later it’ll drive you to seek a solution.

Let’s take a moment and emphasize one word: solution. Here’s where so many back pain treatments fail. While you may have heard how a treatment helped a friend overcome a similar bout of back pain, or read about a promising treatment online, or even received a healthcare provider’s recommendation, what matters is whether or not the treatment works for you.

For example, a friend recommends her chiropractor to you. Chiropractors can often help individuals overcome back pain by correcting spinal misalignments. Removing these misalignments, called subluxations, help eliminate nerve interference allowing your body’s natural healing ability to help you recover from back pain as well as other health issues. Pain relief often results. But what if you continue to go to treatment after treatment with only temporary relief? That’s not a solution, it’s a temporary fix.

One favored back pain treatment modality offered by conventional medicine is the cortisone shot. These steroid injections help control inflammation over the short term which can offer pain relief temporarily – after the initial pain of the shot itself at least. But again, if you’re continuing to return for treatment after treatment with no long term improvement, it’s time to find something else that works.

Again, here’s the bottom line. It doesn’t matter so much who recommends a treatment or even what kind of treatment it is. What matters is whether the treatment works for you. So set yourself three goals when seeking back pain relief:

1.Find out what caused your back pain in the first place. Remember symptoms aren’t always in the same place as the problem. You must treat the underlying cause for permanent relief.

2.Seek a back pain treatment modality, which provides a steady progression of improvement. It may not bring complete pain relief overnight, but it should at least bring incremental sustained improvement in your symptoms. Also, almost always a combination of treatments will be required in order to get lasting relief as there are always multiple underlying causes. For example, we all have muscle imbalances and they pull our bodies out of alignment. To address the imbalances you’d want to perform Muscle Balance Therapy, yet this treatment approach won’t directly address other major causes of pain like trigger points, spinal compression and torsion, nutritional imbalances and excess stress.

3.  Drop failing courses of treatment — provided you were actually following the recommended course of treatment in the first place. No sense wasting your time and money, not to mention suffering continued pain, with modalities that aren’t helping you. Rule of thumb: if you have not experienced improvement after three months consider changing your treatment plan. But also know that if a treatment didn’t work for you before, that does not mean that it won’t work for you in the future. As mentioned above, you may have been using a treatment that didn’t seem to be working yet it really was, but you were unable to tell because the pain was still present due to other causes.