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Back pain after an injury falls into two categories that need different treatment. Mechanical pain comes from the joints, discs, and muscles of the spine itself and usually stays in the back or buttock. Nerve pain happens when something irritates a nerve root, and it travels down the leg, often with numbness, tingling, or weakness. Telling them apart is the first job of the examination.
At Injury Care Centers, our team is dedicated to helping you find relief from back pain, no matter how it started. We know how back pain can disrupt your life, so we work together to create a treatment plan that’s tailored to your needs and your goals.
When you come to one of our Jacksonville clinics, you’ll be welcomed by professionals who listen to your concerns and guide you through every step of your recovery. Our doctors, therapists, and staff coordinate closely to make sure you get the right care, using the latest techniques and treatments.
The best results come from a team approach. If you’re struggling with back pain, don’t wait; reach out to our Jacksonville team or stop by any of our clinics. Walk-ins are welcome, and we’re here to help you get back to feeling your best.
Most back pain comes from just a few key areas in the lower back. Identifying the exact source helps us choose the right treatment.
We treat a wide range of back injuries, including lumbar sprains and strains, herniated and bulging discs, sciatica, facet syndrome, sacroiliac joint pain, tailbone injuries, and fractures from serious falls. You can find the full list of conditions we treat on our injury clinic page.
Mechanical pain comes from the spine’s own structures and typically stays in the back or buttock. It changes with position, is often worse in some postures than others, and eases when the load comes off. Nerve pain travels along the path a nerve supplies, usually down the leg and often past the knee, and commonly brings numbness, tingling, or weakness with it.
The two coexist more often than not. Somebody can have an irritated facet joint and a disc contacting a nerve root at the same time, which is one reason “back pain” on its own tells a clinician almost nothing.
Why it matters practically: mechanical pain responds well to movement, manual treatment, and graded loading. Nerve involvement changes the urgency, moves imaging decisions up the list, and sometimes changes what treatment is appropriate at all. That’s the whole reason your first appointment is longer than you might expect.
How your pain acts can be more telling than how much it hurts.
Pain that shoots down your leg, especially below the knee, often points to a nerve root problem. The same goes for numbness, tingling, or if your foot sometimes drags or catches on a step.
Weakness is even more important to notice than pain. If you have trouble pushing off with your foot, lifting the front of your foot, or standing up from a chair, that’s a sign something more than tiredness is going on.
If your pain is worse when sitting but feels better when walking, it often suggests a disc issue, since sitting puts more pressure on the front of your spine. If standing and walking make the pain worse but leaning forward helps, the cause may be the joints at the back of your spine or narrowing around the nerves.
Morning stiffness that gets better as you move is a different pattern than pain that gets worse with activity throughout the day. Both patterns give us helpful clues.
If your pain doesn’t change no matter how you move or what position you’re in, we take a closer look. Most mechanical pain changes with movement or load, so pain that stays the same needs a different kind of evaluation.
Keep moving within what’s comfortable. Rest beyond the first day or two makes back pain worse, because the deep muscles that stabilize each segment weaken quickly when they aren’t used. A back protected for a month becomes genuinely less able to tolerate load than it was, and then the weakness itself starts causing pain.
That deep layer also switches off in response to pain and doesn’t switch back on by itself once the pain settles.
Its absence is a large part of why somebody who felt fine at week six is back at week sixteen having done nothing obviously wrong. Rebuilding it is unglamorous, repetitive work that no passive treatment substitutes for, and it’s the part people abandon first.
Gentle movement several times a day beats one long session. Stop at the point it starts to hurt.
Your first visit is a physical examination, and it takes longer than a short appointment allows.
Your clinician takes the history first: how it started, whether there was a specific event, exactly where you feel it and whether it travels, what makes it better and worse, what you’ve stopped doing, how you’re sleeping, and what previous episodes you’ve had.
Then the physical work, measured instead of estimated. Range of motion in each direction recorded as numbers, strength tested muscle group by muscle group, reflexes at the knee and ankle, sensation mapped against the nerve root territories, and specific tests that load the disc, the facet joints, and the sacroiliac joint separately.
Palpation locates which levels reproduce your symptoms. Reproducing your actual pain on a specific test is worth considerably more than any description of it, and it’s what separates “low back pain” from a working diagnosis. Those baseline numbers get repeated later. They’re what shows at week four whether the plan is working, and not how you happen to feel on the morning of an appointment.
Usually, you don’t. Most back pain can be diagnosed and treated based on a physical exam alone. We order imaging only when there’s a specific concern, like signs of nerve involvement, increasing weakness, or symptoms that aren’t improving as expected. Digital X-rays can help rule out fractures and show bone alignment, while MRIs are used to look at discs, ligaments, and nerves.
We won’t recommend scans you don’t need, and here’s why:
This is the most useful thing on this page for anybody who’s been handed a scan report and frightened by it.
Lumbar MRI reports are written to describe everything visible, which is exactly what they should do. The language is anatomical, and it isn’t calibrated to how much anything hurts, so a report can accurately describe changes that have nothing to do with your symptoms.
Disc bulges, disc height loss, degenerative changes, facet arthropathy, and annular fissures are all common findings in people who have never had back pain and were never injured. They become more common with age in much the way grey hair does, and their presence doesn’t establish that they’re causing anything. That cuts both ways, and this is the part that gets left out. A report can also fail to explain real pain, because the structures that hurt most reliably aren’t always the ones that look most abnormal.
What makes a finding meaningful is whether it matches the examination. A disc contacting the left L5 nerve root matters a great deal if you have numbness on the outside of the left calf and a weak foot on that side. It matters much less if you don’t.
So if you’re carrying a report that’s been worrying you, bring it in. Going through what it says against what an examination finds is a short conversation, and it changes what a lot of people believe about their own backs.
Treatment starts at the first visit and is built around restoring movement and load tolerance.
Chiropractic care addresses joint restriction and the guarding around a painful segment. Physical therapy and physical medicine provide the strengthening and graded loading, which is where the durable part of the improvement comes from.
Spinal decompression is used where the examination and imaging point to a specific disc level. Supporting therapies are chosen based on the findings instead of applied as a package: laser therapy, shockwave and PiezoWave, TECAR, HEIT, electrical muscle stimulation, and therapeutic ultrasound. Where pain isn’t settling on conservative care, interventional pain management, including injections and prescriptions, is available inside the practice.
Protect your sleep as well. Poor sleep raises pain levels and slows tissue repair, and back pain that won’t settle very often has a sleep problem sitting underneath it. Raise it early, not mentioning it in passing at week six.
A back that isn’t settling is usually being reloaded every day by something nobody has looked at, and the culprits are mundane.
Lifting is the obvious one, and it’s rarely the weight that does the damage. The combination that reliably hurts people is a moderate load lifted while turning, at arm’s length, from below knee height, at the end of a long day when the stabilizing muscles are already tired.
Sitting is the underrated one. Prolonged sitting loads the front of the discs and lets the deep stabilizers switch off, which is why office workers and long-distance drivers present with similar backs despite doing entirely different jobs. The fix isn’t a perfect chair; it’s getting up more often than you currently do.
Sleep position matters less than people expect, and sleep quantity matters more. There’s no single correct position, and there is a reliable relationship between short sleep and higher pain the following day. The last one is inconsistency. A week of doing nothing followed by a Saturday of doing everything is harder on a healing back than a moderate amount every day, and most flare-ups we see are a sudden return to full activity rather than a new injury.
Tell us what your day actually contains rather than your job title. Two people who both say they work in a warehouse can be doing completely different things to their spines.
It’s common for back pain to go away and then return months later. There’s almost always a reason for it, one that’s worth identifying.
One reason is that the original problem never fully healed. Pain often disappears before the tissue is completely repaired and before the deep stabilizing muscles regain strength. That means you might feel fine, but your back is still working harder than it should, until a stressful week causes the pain to return.
Another common reason is an underlying pattern that’s never been fixed. For example, if your hip is stiff or one side is weaker, your back ends up compensating, often without you realizing it. Treating only the back in this case means you’re just addressing the loudest symptom, not the root of the problem.
Sometimes, it’s just life changes, a new job, a longer commute, moving house, or being less active for a while. When your daily routine changes, the stress on your back changes too; what worked before might not work now, and pain can flare up again.
To help, we look at your whole body, not just the spot that hurts. We check your hips, pelvis, and movement patterns to figure out what’s really causing your pain to come back. Then we build a treatment plan based on what’s driving the problem, not just the symptoms.
If you’ve had back pain episodes before, bring that history to your first appointment. Having several flare-ups over the years helps us spot patterns and make a more accurate diagnosis.
Most back pain isn’t an emergency. A small number of presentations are, and these are the ones to act on immediately.
Go to an emergency room now, or call 911, for loss of bladder or bowel control, numbness in the groin, buttocks, or inner thighs, or rapidly worsening weakness in one or both legs. Together, these can indicate compression of the nerve bundle at the base of the spine, which is time-critical.
Also seek emergency assessment for severe back pain following a significant fall or impact, back pain with fever, back pain with unexplained weight loss, or severe pain that came on suddenly and is unlike anything you’ve had before.
Serious injuries across northeast Florida go to UF Health Jacksonville, the region’s Level I trauma center.
Everything short of that list is what a walk-in injury clinic is for.
Most back pain does not need anything clever in the first 48 hours, and a few simple things make the difference between a short episode and a long one.
Keep moving within what is comfortable. Short, frequent movement beats one long session, and it beats lying still. Getting up and walking around the house every half hour is more useful than any specific exercise at this stage.
Use whichever of heat or ice makes you willing to move. Neither is doing much to the tissue after the first day or two, so the deciding factor is which one gets you off the sofa.
Do not test it. The urge to bend as far as you can to see whether it still hurts is almost universal, and it costs people a day every time.
Sleep however you can. There is no correct position, and a pillow under or between the knees helps a lot of people. Short sleep raises pain the following day, so getting a reasonable night matters more than the arrangement.
Write down what you notice before you come in. What hurts, where it goes, what makes it worse, and what you have stopped doing. People consistently under-report in an exam room because sitting still is when a back feels its best.
It depends on how the back was hurt. After a car accident in Florida, your own auto insurance covers medical care as long as you’re seen within 14 days. For a work injury, workers’ compensation usually applies and has its own rules about which doctor you see. For back pain that built up gradually, health insurance is the normal route.
Under Florida’s no-fault law, auto insurance medical benefits are available only where you receive initial services and care within 14 days of the accident.
We see patients with or without insurance. If you don’t have coverage, call 904-783-0008 and ask about our Affordable Plans.
Back pain treatment means coming back several times over a couple of months, so the practical question is which clinic you can reach repeatedly.
| Area | Address | Weekday hours |
|---|---|---|
| Westside, Murray Hill | 5222 Lenox Ave | 8:30 am to 6:30 pm |
| Oakleaf, Argyle | 9680 Argyle Forest Blvd, Suite 20 | 8:00 am to 7:00 pm |
| University, MRI on-site | 4004 University Blvd S | 8:00 am to 7:00 pm |
| Southside | 9191 RG Skinner Pkwy, Suite 201 | 8:00 am to 7:00 pm |
| Mandarin | 3560 Cardinal Point Dr, Suite 101 | 8:30 am to 6:00 pm |
Anyone living out toward Argyle, Chimney Lakes, or Oakleaf Plantation has a very different journey to Argyle Forest Boulevard than to the Southside, and over the course of care, that difference is what most often interrupts a plan.
No appointment needed on weekdays, and after-hours on-call assistance with our doctors is available.
Keep moving within tolerance. Rest beyond the first day or two weakens the muscles supporting the spine and generally slows recovery.
It usually means a nerve root is being irritated or compressed, which changes both the urgency and what the examination looks for.
Not usually. Imaging is ordered when the exam raises a specific question it can answer, such as suspected nerve involvement.
Not necessarily. Bulges are common in people with no symptoms, and a finding matters clinically only when it matches the examination.
Yes, inflammation and protective muscle guarding build over the first days, so the day after is frequently worse than the day of it.
Yes, lifting injuries, falls, sports injuries, and back pain that built up gradually are all treated here.
It depends on the findings and how you respond. Your doctor gives you an estimate after the first exam and reviews it as you improve.
Our practice has treated injuries and nothing else since 2010, and back pain is the presentation where that focus shows most clearly. It’s the one where a short appointment produces the least useful answer.
Injury Care Centers measures the back rather than describing it, separates mechanical pain from nerve involvement before committing to a plan, and brings chiropractic care, physical medicine, rehabilitation, and medical input together with digital X-ray in the building and MRI at University Boulevard South.
If you’re carrying an imaging report that’s been worrying you, bring it. Come in on any weekday without an appointment, or call 904-783-0008 and we’ll tell you which clinic is closest. Addresses and hours for all our Jacksonville locations are on the site.
Last reviewed: August 2026
Medically reviewed by Dr. Donald Lowery, Chiropractic Physician, Florida license no. CH7883
This page is general information and not a substitute for an exam by a clinician. If you have emergency symptoms, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.
Florida law described here is general information, not legal advice. Deadlines and rights depend on your situation, and a lawyer is the right person to advise you on a claim.
