Many patients describe a condition of recurrent stabbing back pain as their main torturous symptom. Stabbing refers to deep localized pain similar to the perception of a puncture wound from a bladed weapon. This type of pain is very frightening for a patient, since it is often severe and feels like it is deep inside the back.
Patients often relate deep pain to a spinal cause, rather than a muscular source, and are understandably alarmed at the perception of sharp structural pain. However, it is crucial to understand that statistically, stabbing pain is not inherently indicative of the seriousness of the causative condition.
Sources of Sharp Back Pain
The perception of stabbing pain can come from a variety of possible physical conditions, including: herniated discs, spinal arthritis and pinched nerves. Any of these common sources of acute back pain can cause sudden attacks of stabbing symptoms in the spine. There is also the possibility of less serious muscular back pain causing this stabbing pain, especially if the affected muscle is deep in the dorsal anatomy.
Piriformis syndrome and sacroiliac joint dysfunction can sometimes create stabbing pain throughout the lower lumbar area of affected patients, often into the hip or buttocks.
There is always the possibility that stabbing pain is also the direct result of a psychological process, most often using oxygen deprivation as the actual causative process.
Stabbing Back Pain Warnings
Deep pain in the torso can be a symptom of a serious health problem. Make sure to get a complete check up for all chronic severe stabbing pains, to eliminate the possibility of a potentially life threatening condition, such as a blood clot, cancer, heart attack or stroke.
Neurological pain is sometimes experienced in a different anatomical region than where the causative condition actually exists. This can make an accurate diagnosis remarkably difficult to achieve.
Make sure to provide your doctor with all the symptoms you are experiencing in order to assist them in making a correct diagnosis of the problem. Without a correct diagnosis, therapy can not progress without guessing about what needs to be treated…
Stabbing Back Pain Ordeal
Deep pain can be a traumatizing experience. During my decades of suffering from mostly lower back pain, I experienced many bouts of stabbing pain in my lumbar and sacral spinal regions. This pain was so severe that it caused recurrent back spasms and really made me fearful for my future. I never would have guessed that such severe pain could possibly be the result of ischemia, but in my case, that was the exact cause of my symptoms.
Throughout my martial arts career, I suffered many stabbing pain attacks in between my shoulder blades and I now know that there are 12 herniated discs in my spine, including all the discs in my neck and the first 4 in the thoracic region. This may explain why these attacks occurred, but then again, it may not. I can say that stabbing pain has not been a burden in recent years, but I still get this variety of deep symptom in the same mid-back/shoulder location every so often and it can be a real torment for a few weeks.
If you need help treating your own chronic back pain, I suggest you use this website as a guide to assist you in talking to your doctor about your diagnosed condition. Be sure to prepare yourself by learning all you can about the reason for your pain and comparing the suspected source to the symptoms you actually have. This will help prevent mistaken diagnosis, which is so common in the healthcare sector, from happening to you!
