How to Help Someone With Chronic Back Pain

The severity of back pain can vary from being an annoyance to becoming a debilitating condition. People who suffer with back pain every day have difficulty conducting their lives productively, even with treatment by the most qualified medical professionals. Often, their friends and family have to provide significant help. These individuals are not usually medically trained, and they find themselves in the position of wanting to provide help without knowing how.

Things You'll Need

• Healthy foods
• Physical activities

Show More

Instructions

Pratical Steps

• 1

  Support physical fitness. Physicians treating patients with chronic back pain typically order physical therapy, exercises or a weight-loss routine. If you are assisting these patients, you can exercise with the patient. If follow-up physical therapy exercises are required at home, you can join in. If you are living with someone suffering from chronic back pain, make sure that meals contain healthy foods that promote weight loss for the patient. Participating in these activities will not only encourage the person suffering from the back pain but will also provide accountability for physical fitness consistency as well.

• 2

  Provide household help for chronic-back-pain patients by rearranging furniture and other everyday items. Find back-supporting chairs and mattresses. If the patient cannot walk upstairs, move the patient's bed to a room where climbing stairs is not required. Move items that the patient needs on a daily basis to locations where they are accessible with the least amount of pain. Using the bathroom and shower can be especially difficult for chronic-back-pain sufferers. Placing a nonskid mat, a hand-held shower head, and a chair in the shower can be a tremendous help to people with back pain.

• 3

  Emotional support is just as important as physical fitness and household help to those who suffer from chronic back pain. Patients who have to deal with back pain day after day may feel frustrated, lonely or even depressed. Listening to their feelings is a helpful start to providing emotional assistance. Doing activities with the patient that are not taxing on his back is another way to provide emotional help. Arrange get-togethers at the patient's home to lift his spirits. Finding anything that will take the patient's mind off of his pain will give him the emotional help that he requires.