About a month ago a coworker pulled a muscle in his back. He went to a Chiropractor. Even though he doesn’t buy all the woo claims of Chiropractic, he thought it would be a good way to fix his back. It took numerous visits and several weeks for him to get better, all the while he was in intense pain.

Friday morning during a nice morning yawn and stretch I pulled a muscle in my neck. Yes, I know that’s pathetic, but between countless snowboarding and quadding accidents and the two car accidents in late 2009 (neither were my fault), I’ve certainly done some damage to my neck and must have turned my head at just the right angle at just the worst time to pull something that was already a little weak.

I figured it would go away after a few hours, but it didn’t. Within four hours the pain radiated down in to my shoulders and even around to my chest. I had reached the point where the pain was bad enough that I didn’t have enough focus to review an employee evaluation or an Internal Investigation Report that colleges had asked me to review. So I went down to the local urgent care. After an agonizing wait, I finally got in to see the PA. He asked where it hurt so I showed him, he felt my neck and could instantly feel the spasm. Turns out it was pretty bad, I had sprained one of the muscles in my neck, kind of like whiplash.

The treatment: put some heat on it, take Norco (similar to Vicoden, just a larger dose) for the pain, and use a muscle relaxer to sleep. The drugs have worked wonders as they have aided in my body healing and made the pain tolerable. It feels good enough today that I may not need any medication.

When it comes to healing something like a pulled muscle, there is actual physical damage and we just need to allow the body to heal itself. There is nothing Chiropractic methods can do to help with that. A massage, while feeling good, wouldn’t heal the damage and would be unlikely to do much for the pain. Both the narcotics and muscle relaxers relax the spasming muscle which makes it easier for it to heal. The narcotics also eliminate the pain (or at least make it so you don’t care). If I had gone the So called Complementary and Alternative Medicine (SCAM) route I would have been in agony for far longer and the healing wouldn’t have gone any faster.

If your pull a muscle see a real medical practitioner. By the way, my colleague’s back pain has come back and he’s seeing a real doctor today.