Rib Cage Pain - Cause and Treatment Options

Rib cage pain is a common yet mysterious ailment. It can happen anywhere from the chest area to the upper and middle back. Most people don't know the cause of this pain. This article discusses rib cage pain and what can be done about it.

It can be very disturbing when a stabbing pain happens in the rib cage. Coughing, sneezing or even laughing becomes impossible, at least without cringing immediately after. A pain like this can persist for days or even weeks. The pain can be so bad that it might even feel like a rib has been broken or cracked which is puzzling if there has been no trauma or accident where a rib could have been broken.

The most common cause for this kind of rib cage pain is actually a rib out of alignment. This is surprising to most people because they don't know that there are joints in the ribs. In fact, they do form joints in the front and back. A look at a drawing of the spine and ribs shows this very clearly. The joints in front are less clear, but they are there none the less.

Ribs actually go out of alignment all the time. They usually correct themselves with normal movements that push and pull the rib cage around in such a way as to cause them to realign. This is rarely noticed as the ribs are not out of alignment long enough to cause muscles to react and tense causing the rib cage pain. Deep breaths, coughing or sneezing cause sudden movements in the misaligned ribs which press on the reactive and inflamed muscles causing the unfortunate pain.

The only thing that can be done when there is a reactive muscle or group of muscles and misaligned ribs is to realign the ribs. There are different ways to do this. A chiropractor is the obvious method. The drawback to this kind of treatment is that the adjustments often hurt due to the force that is used. This causes a lot of people to live with the pain rather than to have an adjustment. There are chiropractors that are good enough to adjust without pain, but there is no way to know which chiropractor is that good. And, even a highly skilled chiropractor can cause pain sometimes.

The good news is that there are gentle ways to do adjustments. Many osteopaths, medical doctors that work with the bones and joints, learn how to do soft tissue adjustments, adjustments that don't rely on force. A few chiropractors discover these method as well. A big disadvantage to using either of these healers is cost, a medical specialist can be prohibitively expensive. Another disadvantage is the multiple visits that may be necessary to affect permanent change. The reason many visits may be necessary is that even though the ribs are put back into alignment, the muscles can be still be reactive causing the misalignment and the rib cage pain to return.