I was in a similar situation with my back a few years ago. It could be absolutely excruciating. While I also had a protruding disc, it turned out a lot of my problem was hanging on to the mental trauma from the death of a family member in the form of muscle tension. What ended up helping me get better was the combination of therapy (mental not physical) and regular massage appointments. There is also a great book by Peter Levine called "Waking the Tiger" that helped me to understand how my body can carry emotional trauma physically.
Not sure if this relates to you at all but hopefully it helps.

This did the trick for me as well. Scanned each thumb twice. Now I rarely, if ever, run into an issue.

Great documentary by Noclip, as usual. I randomly decided to play this game last night without realizing that this doc was going to be released today. As I was playing and explaining the game mechanics to my partner, I described a lot of it as feeling like getting a jackpot on a slot machine. When I watched this I found it super interesting that Luca (the game's designer) worked his way up in game dev by working on gambling games!