Back pain can linger like a dark cloud and get in the way of your day-to-day life. At Advanced Pain Institute in Arcadia and Encino, California, pain management specialist I. Michael Minehart, M.D., offers successful solutions for back pain and works thoroughly and comprehensively to determine the underlying causes.

To show you the complexity of back pain, the following conditions can result in referred pain to the back pain including diseases of the lung, diaphragm, heart, liver, stomach, gallbladder, pancreas, urinary bladder, kidney, abdominal aneurysms, structural changes in the spine, circulation, and even rare autoimmune conditions can manifest itself as back pain.

The most common source of back pain is a muscle strain. Fortunately, these pains are self-limited (not chronic) and can be resolved with rest and mild range of motion exercises. However, when the sprain does not improve in 6-8 weeks, something else is going on. At this point, you could have injured some basic structures of your spine such as a joint, disc, muscle, or nerve.

So if your back pain has no clear diagnosis, you may need interventional pain specialist like Dr. Minehart to diagnose all of the above possibilities. However, since Dr. Minehart isn’t a specialist in every field, he relies on dedicated specialists in others field of medicine and surgery that can provide him an additional insight of the origin and treatment of these pain conditions.