Upper Back Pain: Treatment & Prevention

Upper back pain is most commonly caused by poor posture putting a strain on your muscles and ligaments. 

It can also be caused by overuse or underuse of your muscles or an accident or injury. Other conditions leading to upper back pain include osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, narrowing of the canal nerves run through (spinal stenosis), slipped disc, or autoimmune conditions like ankylosing spondylitis.

Upper back pain can also be pain that is referred from another place, such as organs at the front of your body like the pancreas, liver, or lung. Rarer conditions such as bone cancer can also cause this. Back pain that doesn’t have a clear cause is called non-specific back pain.

Usually, upper back pain goes away on its own within a couple of weeks. There are some home treatment methods you can try to help speed along this process. Taking adequate rest and breaks away from anything that could aggravate your symptoms is a sensible first step.

Gentle stretches and exercises, improving your posture and using simple painkillers like paracetamol or ibuprofen to help reduce pain and inflammation. Using ice packs or heat packs on the area, depending on how long the pain has been going on, can be effective in reducing inflammation and soothing your symptoms. 

Further treatment may depend on what your doctor thinks the underlying cause may be. They may refer you to a physiotherapist, who can arrange injections and other therapies or involve other specialists such as a rheumatologist or an orthopaedic doctor. 

If your back pain is significantly affecting your daily activities or affecting your sleep you should contact your doctor. If your symptoms are not improving, worsening or persisting for more than two weeks despite home treatment methods or you are feeling stiff in the morning, it is sensible to speak with your doctor. If you are in the age groups younger than 20 or older than 50 with persistent back pain then seeing your doctor routinely for an examination would be the best next step.

Some reasons to see your doctor more urgently about your back pain include having had a nasty trauma or injury to your back, if you’ve previously had cancer or you have a weakened immune system, and if there are severe symptoms such as fever, unexplained weight loss, poor appetite, weakness in your legs, loss of control of urine or faeces.