These are the top ten tips for avoiding the possibility of injury and pain in your lower back.
If you’re currently suffering from low back pain or are prone to it, then following a long term course of consistent, sensible, prevention measures will most likely pay dividends.
Think of it like a war – you’re in a war zone, and the enemy is constantly looking to attack you by imposing debilitating back pain on you. So what do you do? Well, you must fight back on several fronts simultaneously. Most of the Top Ten Do’s and Don’ts are not onerous and require only a small amount of effort and this strategy for tackling low back pain can make a major difference to your spinal health over the long term.
- Ensure you adopt good posture at all times – pull your shoulders back and maintain the lordosis
- Keep mobile with gentle movement – do not allow your back to stiffen through fear of further injury
- Do not lean forwards carrying heavy weights – in fact avoid leaning forward at all - period
- Drink plenty of fresh water – at least 2 litres per day to maintain intervertebral disc hydration
- Avoid activities which would tend to cause compression of the spine – such as running, jumping or trampolining
- Perform some simple back strengthening exercises two or three times a week – this will help enormously over the long term
- Avoid excessive alcohol consumption as this can cause dehydration and rob the spine of vital hydration
- Use a lumbar support when driving – especially on long journeys
- Change your mattress for one which gives proper firm support to your spine in your sleep
- Consider buying a spinal decompression device which will not only help with pain reduction and prevention, but will allow you to return to normal activities without risk of further injury
If you follow all of the above ‘tips’ you will build up a credit of back health that will reduce the risk of an occasional relapse into bad practices causing another episode of injury or pain in your lower back.
Will I require surgery to cure my Lower Back Pain?
Well, here is a very interesting statistic, if you’re currently suffering from low back pain - there is a less than 10 percent chance that you will require surgery to cure your back pain. So that means on a purely statistical basis you’re have a more than 90% chance of NOT requiring surgery.
There are certain spinal injuries, diseases and conditions which can only be effectively treated by surgery. This is why you should always consult a Doctor regarding the possibility of potentially serious underlying causes of your back pain.
I have always been of the opinion that I do not want to have any unnecessary surgery. The question uppermost in the minds of most people is very likely to be ‘will I require surgery to cure my back pain?’
Apart from the obvious risks associated with any Operation which involves a Surgeon operating within millimetres of the spinal cord, there are major concerns over the proliferation of hospital superbugs such as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium Difficile (C-Difficile). According to the UK Office for National Statistics, the numbers of deaths from these infections have doubled and tripled respectively from 2001 to 2005, and now number in the thousands annually.
Another question which is worth considering is ‘If I do have surgery will it be effective in the long term?’ There is a study by Weber, H involving a group of 280 patients over a 10 year period, and comparing the results achieved through surgical intervention compare to ‘conservative’ or non-surgical treatment. I was amazed to learn that after ten years, any differences in the results experienced initially by the two groups had disappeared. This means that in the long term it would appear that surgery does not appear to offer any advantage for many types of low back pain problems!
So what are the alternatives?
These include, in no particular order :-
- Physiotherapy
- Chiropractic
- Osteopathy
- Conservative Therapies
- Acupuncture
- Epidural Steroid or Anesthetic Injections
- Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAID’s)
- Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS)
- Chemonucleolysis
If all these sound a little confusing - then you’re probably not alone. One of the most difficult aspects of trying to deal with back pain is the complexity of of he subject and the number of differing therapies, all claiming to offer unique cures.
Personally, I have tried Physiotherapy, Chiropractic, Osteopathy, Conservative Therapies, NSAID’s and TENs and you can read reviews about them all, but the most important fact I believe I ever learned about the subject was to finally UNDERSTAND THE ROOT CAUSES OF BACK PAIN. It was only at this point that I could start to take control of a situation that had randomly and frighteningly controlled me for over twenty years.
I have enormous respect for every good and sincere medical practitioner. Their years of training, hard work and dedication to their profession is awesome. But with the best will in the world a ten minute consultation in the Doctor’s Office is hardly enough time to perform the kind of thorough investigation which is required to establish the root cause of someone’s low back pain.
In my own experience, over many years, the consultation usually went something like this :-
‘Hello Doctor’
‘Good morning - take a seat … What can I do for you today?’
‘Well, I’ve got this stiffness and soreness in my back .. just here’
‘Oh, sorry to hear that. How long have you had it for?’
‘About 3 days now - I was just bending down to pick up a bag of shopping and I felt a sharp stab of pain, and then the stiffness and soreness came on’
‘Any other pain anywhere else?’
‘No Doctor, just here’
‘Very well. Well you appear to have a soft tissue injury. Here’s a prescription for some Ibuprofen Tablets. Take these and if you still have a problem in a weeks time come back and see me’
‘Thank You Doctor’
And off I would go. For the next few days I would hobble around taking great care not to aggravate the injury, moving very carefully, not lifting heavy objects. The Ibuprofen tablets would help to some degree, but unfortunately they have a tendency to mask the underlying pain, which produces a premature sense of healing, and so I would begin to move again in a way which caused further damage and prolonged the eventual recovery.
However, eventually the injury would heal, and I would go back to the normal routine, and the normal ways of doing things.
Now, the problem is that I had learned nothing from the experience.
- I didn’t really understand what had caused the injury in the first place
- The Doctor prescribed pain killing medicine, but did not explain how or why the injury had occurred
- I went away with no knowledge of how to prevent it happening again
After so many experiences like this I eventually decided that I needed to understand a lot more about the cause, treatment and prevention of low back pain, but it took me over 20 years of intermittent suffering to reach this state of mind. The problem is that when a back injury clears up, you just want to get on with the rest of your life, and catch up with what you have been missing whilst you were ill. You don’t really want to do loads of research into the causes of low back pain, because, lets face it, until fairly recently most ordinary people thought that medical matters were exclusively for Doctors to understand and sort out.
