Dr Stephen here from KAW Chiropractic, back pain is the most common symptom that we treat in the practice here. It's really, really common, and most people have either experienced it themselves or even currently have it now, like anything else, when you're dealing with back pain, it's really important to understand why the back pain is there. So for that, one of the easiest and most accurate ways we can do that is just by assessing the alignment and the function of your spine. Now, in a healthy spine, you're going to have a nice level pelvis that's going to set a great foundation for a really straight spine to sit on top of it. From the side, we're going to have some healthy curves in it to give it a spring, like the suspension kind of system throughout it, and that's just going to make sure that all the joints here work evenly and well. And there aren't any that are taking on more load than the others. Now, it's really common over time that when we put our bodies under stress, which everybody does, and that stress might be in the form of accumulative daily stress. So the micro traumas, that's how we're when we're spending too long sitting, how we're lifting, how we're sleeping, how we're bending, all these different things to put bits of stress onto our body. Or it can also obviously be the bigger, bigger traumas, like the macro traumas. So that's like, if we're involved in a car accident, sports injuries, slips and falls onto our tailbone, all these different things. They can put dysfunctions into the spine, which, over time, can influence how it's aligned and functioning. So it can start to alter away from that natural alignment that we want. And if it does that for a long enough period of time, it's slowly going to wear out and stress some of the joints in the back. Now, obviously that can cause pain itself. It can cause stiffness. You might start finding it really difficult to put your socks on because your lower back is really tight. But it can also start to affect all the nerves that come out of the low back and the sacrum here too. So that's where it can become much a whole body picture. So it can start to affect things like the function of your bowel, your bladder, your reproductive organs. It can obviously send sciatic symptoms down your legs or even cause weakness. It's a really big flow on effect, and it's important that, if this is what's causing your sciatica, your back pain, all these different issues, to actually address that issue, get the alignment back, get each of these joints working properly, take stress off them, bulging discs, and let it all heal. The best way to do that and know if that's the problem causing your pain is you just need to get it checked. You need to go through a thorough examination if it's needed. You can have X rays so you can actually see the spine and see what you're working with. And it all just makes it much easier to work with and manage in the long term. You