What have I done to my back?
I hear this so frequently, or I am often told by patients that they know exactly how they ‘did’ it, maybe whilst digging the garden or picking up their child. ‘I’ve never had this before’ is also a common comment.
The truth is that it was always going to happen. A sudden and acute back pain was almost certainly the last ‘tick’ of a ticking time bomb. Rather like a heart attack being something the sufferer ‘never had before’ – we all know heart attacks are usually (ahem) the end-result of years of stress, bad diet, little exercise, smoking, etc. It was pretty much inevitable!
Why are back and neck problems so common?
Ponder this; our lifestyles have changed remarkably over the last few hundred years, we are fully fired up with stress, everything is a rush, we sit in cars, sit at the desk, sit for dinner and flop into armchairs in the evening. Have our bodies evolved at all in the last hundred years??? The answer is no, we have not developed mechanically and neurologically to adapt – therefore we start to ‘break’.
Can any of you adopt this posture for prolonged periods? Check the heels flat on the floor. Check the knees up under the armpits. Could you balance like this for prolonged periods without needing a chair?? It’s very doubtful. I can bet my bottom dollar that this chap does not know what a bad back is.
The bottom line is that we have developed problematic dysfunction in all these areas:
- Balance
- Reflexes
- Muscle length
- Muscle endurance
- Muscle strength
- Joint flexibility
- Joint alignment
- Joint stability
- Posture
- Nervous system communication……
- Then add to all that the effects of stress (an under-firing of our parasympathetic nervous system) and the fact that one area of dysfunction soon creates another area of dysfunction……..,
No wonder something ‘gives’ and we end up in agony!
Successful treatment or rehabilitation requires peeling back all these layers.
Your doctor may have told you that your problem is with a disc, whereas one layer back, we will find the wrong muscles are trying (unsuccessfully) to hold you together – you could replace that disc and the problem will return.
Why not book a session with our Musculoskeletal specialist, Dr Chris Ford BSc (hons) Chiropractic, to find out about more your symptoms.