Lower back pain can come from muscle strain, joint irritation, disc issues, or irritated nerves—and it can make work, sleep, and daily life harder than it should be. At Mountain View Pain Center, we help identify what’s driving your pain and build a plan to reduce symptoms and restore movement. We also treat related problems like tailbone pain (coccydynia) and ongoing pain after back surgery, known as post-laminectomy syndrome.
When to Seek Urgent Care
Seek urgent evaluation if you have lower back pain with loss of bowel or bladder control, saddle numbness, severe weakness, fever/chills, unexplained weight loss, severe unrelenting pain after trauma, or rapidly worsening numbness/tingling.
To recommend the right treatment, we start by identifying what’s driving your symptoms. Your visit may include a review of your history and daily activities, range-of-motion and movement testing, and assessment of muscles and joints in the low back, hips, and pelvis. If symptoms include radiating pain, numbness, or tingling, we may also perform a basic neurologic screen. We also check for red flags to determine whether imaging or referral is appropriate. Wondering whether you need imaging before treatment? Read our guide: do I need an MRI for back pain? And if your pain sits lower — in the hips, groin, or tailbone area — see our pelvic pain treatment page.
At Mountain View Pain Center, our multidisciplinary team combines evidence-based care to relieve pain and restore motion:
Targeted diagnostic injections and image-guided procedures when appropriate to reduce inflammation and calm irritated nerves or joints.
Hands-on adjustments and soft tissue work to improve joint motion, reduce tension, and support better movement patterns. What chiropractic care for lower back pain involves, and when it is not the first step.
A natural option to support pain relief and relaxation, often combined with your broader treatment plan.
The low back refers pain into a fairly small number of places, and where you feel it narrows things down usefully. Pain across the belt line, worse when you bend backward or stand for a long time, and eased by sitting or leaning on a shopping cart, points toward the small joints at the back of the spine.
Pain lower and to one side, at the dimple above the buttock, that hurts on standing from a chair or rolling in bed, often involves the joint where the spine meets the pelvis. Pain across the low back that is worse bending forward and lifting, and worse in the morning, more often concerns the disc.
Pain that leaves the back and travels down the leg is a separate question and has its own page — see sciatica. Pain wrapping around to the front, or into the groin, is worth mentioning specifically, because the hip joint can masquerade as low back pain and the two are treated differently.
A deep, diffuse ache that is worse at the end of the day and eased by lying down is the commonest description and generally the least worrying. Spasm is different and more alarming to experience: the muscles seize, the back locks, and moving in any direction is briefly impossible. It is protective, it is not damage, and it settles.
A sharp catch that appears at one specific point in a movement — bending to the sink, getting out of the car — and vanishes once you are past it is usually mechanical and usually responds quickly. Morning stiffness that takes an hour or more to loosen, especially in a younger adult with pain that improves rather than worsens with exercise, is a different pattern that we screen for, because it points away from simple mechanical back pain.
Pain that is unrelated to position — the same lying, sitting or standing — is the description that earns a closer look, because mechanical problems almost always vary with what you are doing.
Most episodes of low back pain settle substantially within weeks. What turns an episode into a long-running problem is rarely a dramatic structural finding — it is usually the accumulation of sensible-seeming adaptations. You stop bending. You avoid the movement that caught you. You sit more carefully and move less. The back gets weaker and stiffer, and its tolerance for ordinary life shrinks, which produces the next flare on less provocation than the last one.
This is the loop worth breaking, and it is why the treatment for a persistent back looks like graded, progressive loading rather than continued protection. Rest is useful for a few days and counterproductive after that.
It also explains a question we get a lot: why the scan does not match the pain. Degenerative changes, disc bulges and arthritic facets are extremely common findings in people with no back pain at all. A scan describes the structure. It does not describe how the back is being used, how strong it is, or how sensitive it has become — and those are usually the parts that have changed.
Most low back pain is not dangerous, and the small number of presentations that are have a recognizable shape. Loss of bowel or bladder control, numbness in the groin or inner thighs, or weakness in both legs together needs emergency assessment immediately — that combination can indicate cauda equina syndrome, which is a surgical emergency.
Seek prompt evaluation for progressive weakness in a leg, for back pain with a fever, for back pain following significant trauma, and for a new onset of back pain alongside unexplained weight loss, night sweats, or a history of cancer. New severe back pain in someone with osteoporosis, or in an older adult after a minor fall, should be assessed for a fracture rather than managed as a strain.
Everything else is worked up in the ordinary way, which is the reassuring part of this list.
No referral is needed for Chiropractic, Physical Therapy, Acupuncture or Pain Management, and our goal is to get you in within the same week.
We start with the history that separates the patterns above: where it sits, what direction aggravates it, whether it travels, how it behaves through the day, and what you have already tried. Then an examination of how the back moves in each direction, the strength and reflexes of the legs, the nerve tension tests if anything travels, and the hips — because hip stiffness frequently loads the low back and is missed when only the back is examined. Imaging is used when it would change the plan, not routinely.
Chiropractic here uses Diversified, drop-table and Activator techniques, with spinal decompression and dry needling available as modalities; every clinic has a decompression table. Bring a photo ID and your insurance card, any previous imaging, and a list of medications. Where an interventional step is appropriate it is performed in office at Northglenn, north Colorado Springs, Mesa and Glendale, and every other clinic coordinates to one of those.
Every Mountain View Pain Center clinic has Pain Management, Physical Therapy, Chiropractic care and Acupuncture in the same building — so if lower back pain needs more than one kind of care, you do not get handed off to another practice.
Colorado: Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs, Lakewood, Littleton, Highlands Ranch, Lone Tree, Northglenn, Lafayette, Greeley, Fort Collins.
Arizona: Phoenix, Mesa, Chandler, Glendale, Peoria.
No referral is needed in either state. Find your nearest clinic on the full clinic map, or call Colorado (720) 749-5599 or Arizona (602) 325-2024.
Every clinic below has chiropractic, physical therapy and pain management in the same building, so care that starts conservative can step up to injections or an interventional procedure without a referral, a new intake or a second chart. No referral is needed for any of our services, and we verify your benefits before the first visit.
Our clinics from downtown out through the north, west, south and east suburbs. Disc-related low back pain, sciatica and sacroiliac joint pain are the patterns we see most across the metro.
Our clinics — Academy, Interquest and Tenderfoot — covering the north, central and south of the city.
Harmony in Fort Collins and our Greeley clinic serve Larimer and Weld counties.
Our clinics across the Valley, from the West Valley through Phoenix to the East Valley. Interventional procedures, including kyphoplasty, are done in our Arizona offices rather than routed out to a surgery center.
Sciatica usually involves radiating pain, numbness, or tingling that travels from the low back into the buttock and down the leg. We can help determine whether symptoms are nerve-related and what to do next.
Most lower back pain improves with gentle movement and avoiding long periods of rest. We’ll guide you on what’s safe based on your symptoms.
Not always. Many cases improve with conservative care. If symptoms suggest a need for imaging, we’ll help guide that next step.
It depends on the cause. Many patients benefit from a coordinated plan that may include PT, Chiropractic care, Acupuncture, and—when appropriate—Pain Management procedures.
Timelines vary based on the cause and severity. Our goal is to reduce pain and restore function while helping prevent repeat flare-ups.
Often, no. Some insurance plans require a referral or authorization. If you’re unsure, we can help verify what your plan requires.
Often it can. A hip joint problem refers pain into the buttock and groin, and the low back refers pain into the hip, which is why the examination tests both rather than assuming the problem sits where the pain is felt.
It matters a good deal. Pain that is worst on waking and eases with movement points somewhere different from pain that builds through the day, and that pattern is one of the main things the examination uses to decide what is being treated.
The same care, written for the metro you are in: low back pain treatment in Denver, low back pain treatment in Colorado Springs, or low back pain treatment in Phoenix.
Each page names the clinics in that metro, what the first visit involves, and where an interventional step would be performed if one is needed.
Pain that sits in the groin, or over the bony point on the outside of the hip, is a different problem and is covered on hip pain.
Lower Back Pain is treated at every Mountain View Pain Center clinic in Colorado and Arizona — see the full clinic map, Colorado or Arizona.
