Say Goodbye to Back Pain

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Facet joint (side view)

Try to feel your spine with your fingers. You will feel knobbly bits all the way down your
back. These are the spinous processes of the vertebrae. The next time you feel your
doctor prodding your back, you know what he is doing – feeling for the spinous
processes to locate the exact area where he needs to give an injection or map out the
location of the pain.


Don’t close the book yet!! The reason for all this heavy anatomy is to enable you to
understand your doctor and the treatments that you may be subjected to. Each one of
these locations is important either as a causative factor for pain or a place where
treatment can be administered to relieve back pain.


Ligaments


So far we have dealt only with the bony structure of the spine. This is the scaffolding that
houses the spinal cord and protects it. However, the vertebrae would simply collapse
like a house of cards if they were not held together by tissues known as ligaments and
muscles that brace the spine to hold up the weight of the body in an upright position.


As we now know, the vertebrae are arranged in a long vertical column. These vertebrae
are held together by ligaments. Ligaments connect bone to bone. In addition, the

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