Conditions treated
Back pain treatment, worked out on your own floor.
Back pain affects millions of people every day, and it can be debilitating enough to take a real bite out of your quality of life. Jennifer Kirby, PT, DPT specializes in methods that help you find relief, built around your own home and your own daily movement rather than a set routine handed to everyone who walks through a door.
Areas of expertise
Sciatica, strain and the spinal conditions that sit behind them.
Back pain is rarely one thing. It's a symptom that can trace back to a pulled muscle from last weekend, a disk that's been quietly changing shape for years, or bone that has thinned enough to fracture under ordinary weight. Getting a clear read on which of those you're dealing with is the actual starting point of treatment.
Muscle or ligament strain
Repeated heavy lifting or one sudden, awkward movement can strain the muscles and ligaments in your back. If you're already in poor physical condition, the ongoing strain on your back can bring on painful muscle spasms that flare with almost no warning.
Bulging or ruptured disks
Disks act as cushions between the vertebrae in your spine. The soft material inside one can bulge or rupture and press on a nerve. It's worth knowing that you can have a bulging or ruptured disk without any back pain at all. Disk disease is often found by accident, on X-rays taken for something else entirely.
Arthritis
Osteoarthritis can settle into the lower back the same way it settles into a hip or a knee. In some cases, arthritis in the spine narrows the space around the spinal cord, a condition called spinal stenosis, which changes how far you can walk before your legs start to ache.
Osteoporosis
When bone becomes porous and brittle, the vertebrae in your spine can develop fractures that are genuinely painful, sometimes from nothing more dramatic than a cough or a step off a curb.
Where the evaluation happens
Your back gets assessed against the furniture you actually use.
A first evaluation covers your condition, your previous level of function and how the pain is changing what you do day to day. Watching how you get out of your own chair, or bend toward your own low table, tells Jennifer more than a rehearsed movement in a room you've never sat in before.
From there, treatment draws on manual therapy to work the tissue and the joint directly, and therapeutic exercise to rebuild the strength and flexibility that keep the pain from coming straight back once the sessions end.
No referral needed
You don't need a diagnosis before you call.
Wisconsin allows self referral for therapy services, so a physician's order isn't required to get started. Describe what's going on and Jennifer will talk it through with you, whether it turns out to be a strain, something happening at a disk, or a condition worth mentioning to your doctor as well.
Back pain shows up under a lot of different roofs in the full list of conditions treated, from joint conditions to post-surgical recovery.