COVID19 Work From Home Back Pain

Even before COVID19 lockdowns and quarantine,lower back pain was stunningly common afflicting approximately 80% of Americans at some point in their lifetimes. Now that so many of us work from home everyday in … less than ergonomic settings, and people are getting ready to head back to the gym and/or the golf course and become more active as COVID restrictions ease: it’s time to address that pain you’ve been ignoring. It’s time to talk to Summa Pain Care.

Providence.org spoke with Julie Larson, a physical therapist in Rhode Island. They wrote:

“The rapidness in which people were sent home to work [in March] left little to no time to set up a proper office space,” explains Julie Larson, physical therapist at Providence. “Also, without the usual distractions of work, people find themselves sitting for 3-4 hours or more without getting up. That extended sitting leads to poor posture, which can ultimately lead to pain.”

“The stress from juggling life at home can also increase pain from ramped up cortisol, tightness in muscles, shallow breathing and decreased circulation throughout the body,” she adds. “It’s been a perfect storm of factors that contribute to back and neck pain.”

While Providence.org and many other publications like TIME and even CNBC have filled the internet with guides on how to reduce or prevent back problems emerging from poor ergonomics as you work from home… what do you do when the damage is already done?

If you’re like many, many, many Americans who either could not (due to space or financial limitations) or would not for other reasons, update your home workspace to take the strain off of your back and neck, the odds are you’re in quite a bit of pain these days.

Hannah Smothers lamented for VICE

“Seven months (and counting) into an indefinite period of working from home, the consequences of slouching and hunching are beginning to show. I’m in an ergonomic hell of our own making, completely unequipped to interior-design my way out of this problem.”

If you’re in Phoenix, North Scottsdale or Peoria you have Summa Pain Care to help you bring your back and neck to pre-COVID (or better) standards. Dr. Paul Pannozzo’s three locations provide a multitude of corrective treatments to help restore you to working pain free. (And hopefully, we’ll all listen to advice on ergonomics in the future. Right?) At Summa Pain Care, we diagnose, consult and treat all with one stop.

The potential problems associated with poor ergonomics or posture include:

• Cervical (Neck) Pain
• Thoracic (Mid Back) Pain
• Lumbar ( Low Back) Pain
• Disc Displacement
• Spinal Stenosis
• Spinal Arthritis
• Headache
• Shoulder Pain
• Elbow Pain
• Wrist / Hand Pain
• Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

Each of these painful conditions carries their own best treatment plans but with the Summa Pain Care’s ability to diagnose, consult and treat on-site we can employ advanced treatment options like Spinal Cord, Dorsal Root Ganglion or Peripheral Nerve Stimulation Trial and Implants, Discography with Intradiscal Platelet Rich Plasma, Vertiflex or Sacroiliac Joint Intervention: Block, Injection, Ablation or Fusion.

As the premier pain management specialists in Peoria, Phoenix and North Scottsdale, Summa Pain Care can,

• Perform specialized tests for diagnosing your chronic pain conditions.
• Appropriately prescribe and/or manage medications to any unique conditions at varying levels of severity. Also help reduce or eliminate your prescription pain medications.
• Perform procedures like nerve blocks, radio frequency ablations and spinal injections.

There is a lot of very aggravating talk about “the new normal” most times the very mention evokes a certain nauseating eye-roll, but this is just how things are now. Hundreds of Thousands of people are now working from home and are likely to continue to do so (hopefully we setup our workspaces a little better with some hard-learned lessons). Julie Dorsey, chairwoman of the Department of Occupational Therapy at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York told patch.com the most important thing to do is pay attention to your body,

Dorsey said.

“With all the distractions we talked about, people may not be listening to their bodies the same way they used to and won’t realize until the end of the day what’s hurting,” she said. “But by then, it might be too late.”

Your best options to try to reverse the damage to your back and necks are to visit a real pain care specialist like Summa Pain Care to have your unique needs diagnosed. Find your nearest location in Peoria, Phoenix or North Scottsdale today and don’t put this off any longer. Unaddressed back and neck pain generally doesn’t improve.