Oxygen Ozone Therapy: An ally against back pain | Festina Lente - Your leading source of AI news | Turtles AI

Back and neck pain that worsen upon awakening are common but often misunderstood. Behind morning stiffness and nighttime pain lie mechanical, inflammatory, and systemic causes. Understanding them helps guide you toward more targeted and modern therapies.

There’s a time of day when the back seems to take its toll: as soon as the alarm goes off, even before the coffee, the body protests. Morning back pain and nighttime neck pain are among the most frequently reported complaints in medical clinics, almost as if they were a collective ritual of our time. During sleep, the spine isn’t as immobile as we think: poor posture, inadequate mattresses, and the wrong pillows can accentuate existing compressions, especially if there are herniated, protruding, or deformed discs. Added to this is a less intuitive but frequent phenomenon: fluid retention, which can increase pressure on the nerves during the night and make waking up a minor daily trauma. Then there are the muscles, silent sentinels that tense up at night: the iliopsoas, a deep bridge between the spine, pelvis, and lower limbs, is often the source of pain that improves after a few steps, when movement "wakes" it up before the mind. Not to be forgotten is osteoarthritis of the vertebral facets, tiny but crucial joints that feel "dry" and stiff in the morning, only to lubricate with activity, providing temporary relief. However, there is a more subtle pain, one that isn’t solely caused by wear and tear: that associated with rheumatic and inflammatory diseases, which can camouflage themselves among mechanical problems and manifest themselves precisely at night or at dawn, improving with movement. Fibromyalgia is increasingly appearing in this scenario, especially in women, with its accompanying symptoms of widespread pain, unrefreshing sleep, and persistent contractures. The picture becomes even more complicated when chronic stress, bruxism, chest breathing, diaphragmatic changes, or even intestinal disorders come into play: the intestines and the spine, neighbors, influence each other more than we imagine, especially when sleep quality deteriorates. The neck also tells similar stories: altered posture, trauma, joint degeneration, cervical hernias, autoimmune diseases, or, more rarely, more serious conditions, even overlooked causes such as tension in the connective tissue or excessive workload of the accessory muscles of respiration. Within this complex mosaic, a medical practice has gained increasing interest in recent years: Oxygen Ozone Therapy. Initially used primarily for herniated discs, sciatica, and back pain, it is now used in numerous areas of pain therapy and regenerative medicine. Medical ozone, administered using different techniques depending on the problem, acts as an anti-inflammatory and analgesic, improving microcirculation, tissue oxygenation, and stimulating biological repair mechanisms. International scientific literature, with thousands of indexed publications, has progressively outlined its potential benefits, so much so that in several hospital settings it is being proposed as an alternative or adjunct to more traditional treatments. The comparison with cortisone arises almost spontaneously: the same objective on pain and inflammation, but different biological pathways. Cortisone, a valuable but demanding drug, carries with it a long list of side effects, ranging from bone metabolism to glycemic control, from the digestive system to the immune system. Oxygen-ozone therapy, according to its proponents, allows in many cases the reduction or avoidance of prolonged steroid use, without interfering with other medications and without inducing allergies, precisely because it uses a mixture of medical oxygen and ozone in controlled doses. It is therefore not surprising that it is also used in rheumatology, orthopedics, dermatology, and chronic inflammatory disorders, with costs comparable to other therapies that are not always as targeted. In Liguria, as in many other regions, it remains predominantly a private healthcare service, with limited options for subsidized treatment.

Oxygen Ozone Therapy is performed in Genoa by Prof. Luigi Valdenassi, Italian president of SIOOT, at the Magenta Medical Practice.