Where did we get the idea that muscles can be strained or painful without affecting anything else? Consider the following: muscles do nothing, zero, zip, nada unless they are attached to bones (spinal bones or arm/leg bones). Muscles have to pull against something solid like a bone to create movement. So when you have neck or back pain that doesn’t go away – just treating the muscle with heat, or ice, or patches on your skin, or taking Alleve is often ineffective because the bones are also out of alignment and contibuting their own trouble to ongoing neck or back pain. If it’s truly, only muscular – you will feel better in 3-5 days (ie. after a hard work out at the gym, you feel sore but then improve). If it lasts longer than that, you owe it to yourself to let a chiropractor take a look because we are musculoskeletal specialists – not only muscles but how they affect and work with bones.