The Thing I Like About Dr. Stephen Courtney Is He Doesn't Push Surgery

CourtneyMD.com
Dr. Stephen Courtney is a Board Certified Orthopedic Spine Surgeon treating neck and back disorders. His clinic is located in Plano, Texas.

Cynthia & Leslie Warren Patient Testimonial.

I Like Dr. Stephen Courtney Because Of His Approach In Treating My Pain

CourtneyMD.com
Dr. Stephen Courtney is a Board Certified Orthopedic Spine Surgeon treating neck and back disorders. His clinic is located in Plano, Texas.
Patient Testimonial by Amy Vest an athlete, former gymnast, and gymnastics coach.

What Is Back Pain? Dr. Stephen Courtney Explains.

CourtneyMD.com
Dr. Stephen Courtney is a Board Certified Orthopedic Spine Surgeon treating neck and back disorders. His clinic is located in Plano, Texas.

Everyday new patients ask, What is Back Pain? Here's the answer:

My back hurts is the most common thing I see in my clinic all day thing. “What’s wrong? My back hurt.” How did you do it? “I don’t know.” You have to understand the layers of back pain. You have skin. You have fat. You have muscles. And then you get into the bone anatomy, then you get involved in the facet joint pain, the bone pain. Bone hurts. It has pain fibers too. And then you go to the SI joint pain. And if you keep going deeper, then you get into the spinal canal. So, a lot of people can have a real tight spinal canal and they have stenosis. So that’s another culprit. And the arthritis has to go somewhere, so it goes to the bone. And then the other one, next in line would be the disk material. So you can have a bulging disk or a painful disk. All those factors can give you back pain. You always have to rule out tumors, infections, stuff like that but you don’t want to hear about this. Back pain is a very generic word, unfortunately.

Dr. Stephen Courtney - What Is A Herniated Disk?

CourtneyMD.com
Dr. Stephen Courtney is a Board Certified Orthopedic Spine Surgeon treating neck and back disorders. His clinic is located in Plano, Texas.
Disk herniation is very, very commonly diagnosed because a lot of people get it. Majority of people don’t need operation on it. But when that disk blows out against the location where the disk goes and what nerve it’s hitting. It’s also about what levels. The most common level that blows out is L5-S1, and that would go down your back of your butt, back of your thigh down to your calf. A different one would be L45 which would go in front of your thigh, down the front of your shin bone, down to your big toes. So there’s different patterns of pain that comes from each particular disk segment.

Activity aggravates them a lot, the twisting and turning. I see a lot of middle age patients that come through here, that’s when it starts. “I used to do this, used to do that.” What’s happening is you’re getting older. You just don’t know it. So that’s when the disk slowly start the early phases of degeneration. There’s little painful cracks in the disk space, that starts the process.

Dr. Stephen Courtney - Why Sitting Is the New Smoking--Tips If You Sit At Your Desk All Day

CourtneyMD.com
Dr. Stephen Courtney is a Board Certified Orthopedic Spine Surgeon treating neck and back disorders. His clinic is located in Plano, Texas.

Sitting in our job marketplace is almost like the new smoking. Sitting, you get static, the blood flow doesn’t go like it should be going to your muscles, in your neck, in your back. You get all tensed up on the computer. All that tension, all that tightness typically goes to the scapula, the upper part of your neck. That’s where stress goes, that’s where the muscles get real tight at. That tech neck, it’s a real issue in the United States. Usually it’s just from being static so long and being so tense, where the muscle get real tight. Those usually are trap muscles. So if you’re going to sit at your desk all day, it’d be nice if you had like a 5 pound weight or 10 pound weight where you could do some overhead dumb bells to move the muscles or some light biceps or also triceps curls or shoulder shrugs just to loosen up the muscles throughout the day.

I think it’d be good if you could do that or get one of your desks that you can move up and down. They have them now at several places. You can get them now, you to know make that desk. But the main thing is overhead activity, just even shoulder shrugs or even jumping jacks without doing the jumping, just motion over the head with your arms and shoulder can help definitely loosen up the muscles.


It doesn’t cause a permanent damage but the sitting puts a lot of pressure on the lower back just like it does the neck, especially in the lower back. So when the person sits, biomechanically, it puts about 30% more pressure and strain on the lower back. When you have a patient with a real hot disk herniation, they are very very rarely sitting, they’re standing up, they rarely sit down.

Dr. Stephen Courtney - How To Keep A Healthy Back Through Diet & Exercise

CourtneyMD.com
Dr. Stephen Courtney is a Board Certified Orthopedic Spine Surgeon treating neck and back disorders. His clinic is located in Plano, Texas.
Transcript:
Diet and exercise is a gigantic factor in backs. A lot of people, they say, “I can’t lose weight because I can’t exercise.” Well, if you don’t eat so much food, I can assure you, you can lose weight. You may not lose it in a day, you may lose it in about two or three months.
It’s very important to eat the right type food. Very, very important to watch the weight. I always encourage people not to get puffy. That’s very important. Drink a lot of water throughout the day. Then exercises, cardio is key. You have to do some form of cardio, either a spin bicycle or an elliptical machine. If you do a treadmill, do it on a flat surface not on an incline. And then just some light weights, instead of doing heavy weights just to engage the muscles and get the blood flowing to the muscles again and just motion. Do it on a consistent basis.

I think walking is fine. At least it gets you out with motion and blood flow through your body again. But sitting down a lot and being sedentary is not good for anything but walking is okay. It doesn’t melt the muscles a whole lot that support the back regarding your shoulders, your traps, and your lat muscles. So light weights are really important, to engage in some type of light weight activity. But walking is perfectly as long as you don’t have stenosis.